Welcome to JAKE’s Studio

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I invite you to a little getaway from the stresses of everyday life and norms and allow your mind to wander among more than 30 years of my paintings sculptures, poems and prose.  Remain as long as you dare and enjoy glimpses inside the heart, mind, and soul of JAKE as I express my thoughts and feelings about the people, places, things, and events from the past and present using whichever mediums, often mixed, I feel best tell the story. Most of the pieces are accompanied by prose and poems which provide a hint about each piece… but they are best viewed unbiased through your eyes and your open mind.

 

About the Artist

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I was born in Connecticut in 1949 and enjoyed growing up in New England with its dynamic seasons: colorful falls, snowy winters, floral springs, and warm summers.  It’s a wonderful place to live your childhood.  I joined the Naval Air program as a late teen and was able to travel throughout parts of Europe and North Africa where I spent my off time lugging cameras and lenses around the most unique places I could find, photographing the experiences, and enjoying the local cultures.  Quite the eye-opener!

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After four years I returned to Connecticut and began working in New York. My area of business responsibility included a geographical area stretching from the hard-hit areas of the South Bronx, through the opulence and wealth of Westchester County, up through the scenic Hudson River valley with its quaint villages, and as far as Kingston, New York.  Again, some eye-openers. In 1982 I was offered an excellent business opportunity located in Southern California, so my family and I made the move and have been here ever since. 

 

For some reason I have always been drawn to the arts. I enjoyed looking at other artist’s work and would dig deep searching for what they saw and felt when creating their pieces, what story were they trying to convey to others. Perhaps this created a craving which remains with me today so that everywhere I go, with the people I meet along with experiences I have, I am driven to express through my art what I see and feel.  To capture my feelings and tell their story.

 

About JAKE’s Art Style

 

Having had no formal art training, in the early days I was frustrated by my inability to aptly share my feelings about people, places, things, inner thoughts, and muses of current as well as past events I encountered in any traditional style. To mitigate these frustrations due to lacking the skills that formal training might have provided me, I stopped trying to focus on any one style of art or medium to work with. 

 

Being self-taught, I simply worked with whatever materials, colors, textures, and mediums that I felt best expressed the intense feelings I was experiencing regarding the subjects that had mused me.  This philosophy is perhaps a bit too scattered for art purists, but it has aligned well with me and continues to enable me to express what I see and feel regardless of styles. If I had to guess, I believe that Outsider Art* is the most accurate to describing my style. However, I’ll leave that up to my viewers for their own classification.

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In conclusion, my art is created to evoke (perhaps provoke) viewers to look deeply into the subject matter of pieces that capture their attention and experience through their own eyes and minds the story that is being told.

 

*Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.

The term outsider art was coined in 1972 as the title of a book by art critic Roger Cardinal.[1] It is an English equivalent for art brut (French for "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created in the 1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture.