Event Details - Jacob Bartanus: End of Exhibition

Bio:
Autodidactic since a young child, I always had a love for color and the honesty it would allow a person to express their most inner experiences. I can still remember the feeling of receiving a fresh box of crayons as a child from my parents along with a box of paper they had given me that was meant for their typewriter. Each blank sheet connected to one another, I would pull one out at a time on the floor and ruthlessly press its intoxicating waxy color pigment to all the white space and be totally lost in the possibilities of each passing sheet.

I have always since the days of childhood looked at the world as a series of connections and experiences.

I believe that your day-to-day life is filled with lost memories of places you’ve been or shapes and colors you’ve encountered.

These memories can be anything from the smell of a cold winters day to the feeling you get when standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. That sense of wonder that is there one moment and gone the next.

I collect information in the material world and through the process of automatism I emerge or submerge those memories onto the surface of a canvas.

Guided by the two sides of our brain the Apollonian and Dionysian (the gods of chaos and order). My work is a constant dance between control and risk that lives on the edge of something beyond physical manifestation and in its attempt, tries to find the balance through color using acrylic on canvas and sometimes mixed media. The work is not a pedantic product of a repetitious or narrowed study. It changes and shifts with an essence of the many different glimpses that inspire me as I encounter them, like trying to take a snapshot of a whisper or the glimpse of a passing thought.

As a local resident and commercial truck driver in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I’m continuously drawn to the geometric and biomorphic shapes around me as well as the random sounds or smells. Anything from road signs, clouds, graffiti, to the loud music being played from a neighboring vehicle while waiting at a red stop light or the aroma from local restaurants and nature mixed with wet trash and exhaust from passing vehicles. I paint with every intention to not over think the process and allow these two gods to come to some sort of middle ground, where beauty and chaos live together in a symbiotic relationship.