Jeffrey Gold
Jeffrey Gold
Jeffrey Gold
Jeffrey Gold
Painter Jeffrey Gold was born in Los Angeles in 1958 and continues to
live and work in his native city. Graduating from the Art Center
College of Design in Pasadena in 1983, his greatest individual
artistic influence has been his former teacher Charles Bell, who died
in 1995 yet whose extraordinary body of work and indefatigable
mentorship remains indelibly inculcated in Gold's mind and experience.
Just as Bell once stated how he was "concerned with feelings we share
about familiar objects", Gold reflects both his powerful understanding
of his predecessor's work and respect for him as a person in his own
painting Still Life, Homage to Charles Bell.
When living and working in Rome in the early 1990's, Gold immersed
himself in the cultural aspects of the Eternal City. His visits to the
Villa Borghese inspired an ongoing love affair with the still life
work of Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, whose dramatic use of light
continues to awe and inspire Gold. Yet it was his strolls through the
bustling vegetable, fruit and flower markets of Trastevere and Piazza
Campo dei Fiori that honed his eye on still life as an irresistible
subject matter.
The objects which appear in such still lifes and which give literal
and metaphoric support to his immaculate flowers and fruit, such as
the modernist red vase in his Still Life with Yellow Tulips, were all
owned at one point or another by the artist and cherished by him. Thus
a magical equipoise is preserved between the meticulousness of his
renderings and the loving sentimentality and spiritual peace imbued in
his forms.
Peace and love are recurring themes in Gold's portrait work as well.
His sitters are amongst his closest friends, family members, former
girlfriends and lovers, possibly a woman with whom he is presently
romantically involved, and perhaps most poignantly his ex wife
Ann-sofie, to whom he was married for fours years. Once again, a
melding of physicality, sexual or merely corporeal, and tenderly
disclosed inner beauty balance these evocative paintings of people.
Gold seems to tell us that beauty is not transitory and ephemeral, but
that it survives the total range of human experience and emotion.
Jeffrey Gold is represented by Forum Gallery, one of the leading
representational galleries in the country with locations in New York
City and Los Angeles. Working with Forum, examples of Gold's work are
presently in many private as well as public collections throughout the
United States and Europe. His painting Still Life with Lemons is
included in the monumental exhibition Representing LA, which
originated in December of 2000 at the Fry Art Museum in Seattle and is
presently on view at the Laguna Museum of Art.
Niccolo Brooker
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