Tuesday, 12 February 2008

jeffrey gold



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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