JASON NEEDHAM

JASON NEEDHAM has had a long-standing interest in impressionism, post-impressionism, and early American modernists like Marsden Hartley. All the other obvious influences apply: David Hockney, Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, among others. The five years he spent as an art museum security guard, Needham refers to as his working-class graduate school. While he took my security duties seriously, he spent thousands of hours examining the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum and as well as travelling exhibitions of Pierre Bonnard, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer. The trick is to see these mundane moments as majestic while allowing the mistakes of hand and misconceptions of eye be as present as the purposeful. He likes the paintings to coalesce from a distance but upon close inspection fall apart into marks and the process of making, with the underlaying scaffolding of the image still visible. Each brushstroke becomes a single particle and the painting a wave of time-space.

Jason Needham

“The Light of Day”

Acrylic on Canvas Stretched on Panel

20 x 30