Fall term Artist-in-Residence Jake Berthot, an abstract painter who lives and works in New York, will display some of his work in the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries at the Hopkins Center next term.
As an Artist-in-Residence, Berthot will have his own studio, exhibit his own work and will also be available to help and critique upper-level studio art majors during the term.
The program creates a forum for contemporary artists to exhibit their works, and provides the community with a chance to experience some of the most recent powerful artistic expressions.
Through his paintings, Berthot visually grasps the observer's emotions with his own personal feelings.
He indirectly maintains a delicate rapport with both a stark and naked reality and the hazy and metaphysical veil of fantasy and memory.
"In the paintings, I am trying to take those veils away, to get to a kind of bare-boned, raw experience -- trying to get in touch with the reality of the moment," Berthot told ARTNews in 1989.
The renowned New York artist works with abstractions capable of evoking a spectrum of emotions through texture, form and color.
This type of visual language reads as an abstract narrative, both personal and universal.
It isnot surprising that Jake Berthot is known as a "painter's painter."
This fall the College will exhibit several of Berthot's paintings from Boston's Nielson Gallery, which had a spectacular show of works by the artist in April.
Berthot's exhibit will open on Sept. 26 followed by his lecture in the evening at Loew's Auditorium. His works will be on display until Oct. 30.
The exhibit will consist of about six to seven paintings from the series of "The Red Paintings," along with smaller studies and several drawings.
The series is particularly appealing in its monochromatic red color and small scale, painted over the past four years. They read as a deeply moving abstract narrative.
Berthot chronicles a progression of human emotion, ranging from turmoil to joy through this series.
The textural quality of his paintings moves from his characteristically dense, thickly layered passages to thinner lighter layers.
Berthot utilizes vibrant colors of red, orange and yellow pigments that charge the piece with sensuality and supernatural vitality.
The presence of an oval shape in some form became Berthot's signature in some of his earlier works, such as "Grief for that Future."
The transformation of the rectangle to its most recent oval shape is consistent with the painter's emotional metamorphosis.Gradual emergence of the rectangular is a far cry from the amorphous and hovering oval shape from earlier paintings.
Other paintings like "Squaring Red," "Allow It To Be Given" and "Pleasure Long Past," are passionate works, ranging from rage and grief to hope, and buoyant spirits from the past and present.
These emotions unfold through intense and delicate brush strokes and color usage on canvas.
Berthot's artistic career has prospered despite personal hardships.
At an early age, his dyslexia caused trouble with his school work, and he wouldmake pages of "pretend writing."
He has now developed these private "texts" as indications of a personal freedom within a complexly dynamic work of art.
John Elderfield, director of the MoMa's department of drawing told in ARTNews Berthot's paintings are "part of a continuum that stretches back through Abstract Expressionism and modernism to Titian and Tiepolo.He is not speaking a new language, but studying an old one and saying new things with it."
Berthot's ability to create such emotional and gripping paintings has gained him recognition amongst contemporary artists and art critics.
He is an artist who attacks convention to venture forth on his own.
