Originally from Los Angeles, I am an artist making a New York debut from my studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. With this showing of large paintings, I have revived and renewed color-field, hard-edge abstraction. I come from a family of...
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Originally from Los Angeles, I am an artist making a New York debut from my studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. With this showing of large paintings, I have revived and renewed color-field, hard-edge abstraction. I come from a family of artists. My father Herbert Jepson was a prominent and influential teacher who founded the Jepson Art Institute, an important Los Angeles art school. He also taught at Chouinard, which later became Cal Arts. I attended Chouinard in high school and got my MFA from the Otis Art Institute in 1978, where I studied under Emerson Woelffer, a California abstract expressionist and colleague of Robert Motherwell. Significant influences came from artists who were family friends, including Rico Le Brun, William Brice, Fred Hammersley and Jack Goldstein.I bring a subtle, unique and refined difference to classic, non-objective abstraction. It is an expression of inherent psychological stress that moves these images towards geometric structuring. There is a discordant, paradoxical quality engendered—an obscure and obsessive psychic dream architecture that builds with autonomy and tension while on the verge of collapse. Simple and tough compositions naturally evolve from the confluence of unstable forms and daunting infrastructure. I am expanding the visual lexicon of this sensibility, adding to the nature of the discourse. A collective quality starts to emerge. The precarious stage is set, and with resonance it is validated to become a real place, excavated and built. The work has a strong insistence on perspicuity and clarity. Evident in these configurations is a sense of space, both intimated and equivocal. I am primarily a colorist, investigating an intuitive sense of relational esthetics. Using a felicitous palette of considerable restraint, I work with color schemes that often begin muted, grayed, industrial and subtle—a platform of dark livery color will then be off-set with a bright, commercial reference. There is a modernist affinity for polarities and paradox as I attempt a read that is synonymous with the sensations of gravity and vertical tension. I am inspired by the analytic precision of Josef Albers and the quiet certainty of Milton Avery, as well as being influenced by the color concepts of hypnagogic vision studied by Stan Brakhage. The paintings provide a metaphysical, mysterious and evocative force against an invisible resistance. I believe that they are a significant contribution to contemporary culture, both salient and sublime.