Event
Jesse Allen: Works on PaperPost an Event »
Chandler Fine Art & Framing
May 1 - May 31, 2014Info
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http://www.chandlersf.com/
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(415) 546-1113
Works on paper by Kenya-born, California-based painter and printmaker Jesse Allen.
"Jesse Allen is an artist of astonishing intensity and power. Across his precise visual language he had found ways to express the beauty and cruelty, the passion and the harmony, of the life process itself. The actors are animals, but don’t be deceived: the protagonist is Man." — Norman Bryson, Professor of History and Theory of Art, The Slade School of Fine Art, London
For forty-five years, Allen has been a highly visible staple of the Bay Area art community and continues to expand the breadth of his work. Influenced heavily by the landscape of Kenya, where he was born and lived until his late teens, Allen creates fantastical but deep images of animals and jungles—wild or cultivated, but rarely tame. Rendered in concentric saturated colors, his richly detailed techniques create a visual maze that can be followed throughout entire works, and his personal mythologies infuse symbolism within each individual plant, creature, and earthform, creating highly complex visual narratives and weaving a spiritual portrait of an imagined place.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1936, Allen received a degree in modern languages from St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, England. Allen cites the two years following his graduation, spent living in Milan, as fundamental to his development as a painter. An entirely self-taught artist, Allen moved to the United States to teach and eventually left his post as a language professor at Stanford University to pursue painting full-time. Exhibiting since 1968, Allen has shown throughout the US and internationally, including San Francisco Museum of Art and Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco; Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio; Museum Gallery, Alberta College of Art’s Museum Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; and The International Triennial Competition of Print in Osaka, Japan. Exhibiting with Chandler Fine Art since 2005, he lives and works in Humboldt County, California.