Gray Jacobik

About My Current Body of Work: Non-Objective & Abstract Paintings 2012

My current work I refer to as “color-field with complications”. Color is the subject, primarily, and secondarily, are the myriad of marks, some more gestural and repetitive than others, that make their way to the surface through a complex array of additive and subjective processes. Painted in acrylic and using various acrylic medium, particularly modeling paste and illuminating and metallic glazes, and working on MDF or cradled board, color is poured, brushed, sprayed or applied with a brayer, then subtracted (through several iterations) with a rotary sander, reapplied, etched, scratched, and so on until a coherent ‘world’ appears. Bernstein’s definition of a great work of art as one that “makes you an inhabitant of that world . . that invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air” has always resonated with me as a worthwhile objective for any individual painting. Obsessed with the question, “What constitutes integrity in a work of art?” and desiring each painting to be an inhabitable world, the process through which these paintings evolve, is the form of that inquiry and the form of that desire.

Gray Jacobik
September 2012