overview

In Jeff Ferst’s Abstract Landscapes we encounter the world as a very colourful and hopeful planet. These paintings are juicy and flamboyant in their use of bold color and heavy textural applications of paint. Incorporating recognizable and traditional landscape elements Ferst accentuates objects and manipulates their shape to create lyrical images that invite the viewer into his world. Red skies, orange fields and purple mountains fill his world. It is a world teaming with life and where emotion meets reality.

Ferst also paints geometric landscapes.

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about the artist

Ferst was born in the Bronx in New York City in 1955. As a child, he was involved in drawing and painting, and through his mother he was exposed to art in New York’s museums. Ferst went on to major in printmaking (specializing in serigraphs) at New York University, graduating in 1976. One of his printmaking instructors at NYU was also a textile designer, and while in school Ferst produced wall hangings of printed fabric, and created a series of portraits with stuffed fabric on canvas, which he sold through a New York gallery.

From his college days, a group of artists have remained important to Ferst, starting with the Impressionists, for their focus on intense color relationships. In Kandinsky and Klee, he found artists who combined an imaginative approach to abstraction with an inventive and personal feeling for color. In Cubism, Ferst discovered a model for the activated division of space, which he continues to explore in his current work.

After college, Ferst traveled around Europe and the U.S., eventually settling in Canada in 1978, where he has lived ever since. After running a food company and working in furniture design, he started producing a series of realistically painted still lifes and landscapes. These early works, while traditional in subject matter, had a contemporary edge and the vibrant palette that was to mark Ferst’s later paintings. In this period, he was exhibiting his work primarily in galleries in Ontario.

In 2005, Ferst experienced a personal and artistic turning point. He survived an episode of Sudden Cardiac Death, and after emerging from the trauma began to paint again. But the work that emerged was new to Ferst, completely abstract paintings with vibrant squares of color. The process of making this emerging work was, in the artist’s words, “natural and effortless.” These painting have continued to evolve over the next five years, becoming dense with curving arcs and interlocking forms. Faces and bodies, trees and animals, all became visible in the work. Recently, Ferst has been combining multiple panels to create a single painting. The paintings vibrate with color, creating a moving and joyful visual experience, described in 2008 as “flagrantly flamboyant” by Tara Tassone in the Preston Catalogue.

Ferst has shown his painting in exhibitions at Art Mode in Ottawa, and Calgary, at the Saint John Art Center, Saint John, New Brunswick, and at many other venues. In 2010, Bruce McGaw Graphics Canada will publish a series of Ferst’s giclee prints. The artist lives and works in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada.

Ferst also paints geometric landscapes.

exhibitions

2011
• Art Expo NY, NYC
• Double T Gallery, Solo Show, Waterloo , Ontario
• Art Allies Group Show, Waterloo , Ontario
• Society Canadian Artists, Juried Group SAhow, Leighton Art Centre, Calgary, AB
• Scope Hampton, New York
• Studio Tour, Cambridge, Ontario
• Red Dot Miami

2010
• National Juried Art Exhibition 2010, Visual Art Center, Punta Gorda, Florida
• Toronto Art Expo, Toronto, ON
• Artists Haven Gallery, Ft. Lauderdale, July
• Artists Haven Gallery, December
• Colour & Form Society, Juried Group Show, Toronto, Ontario
• Cambridge Centre for the Arts, Cambridge, Ontario, Juried Group Show
• Glenhyrst Gallery Juried Show, Brantford, Ontario

2009
• Art Mode Gallery, Ottawa ON
• IIDEX/Neocon, Toronto
• International Juried Show, Federation Canadian Artists. Vancouver
• Saint John Art Center, Saint John NB
• Chancery Art Gallery, Bracebridge ON

2008
• Art Mode Gallery, Calgary AB

2007
• Art Mode Gallery, Ottawa ON
• Gallery Double T, Waterloo ON

2006
• Cambridge Centre for the Arts, Cambridge, ON

2002
• The Grand View Juried Exhibition, Waterloo ON
• The Eldon Gallery, Waterloo ON

2001
• The Cambridge Centre for the Arts, Cambridge ON

2000
• Pride Juried Show, Forest Gallery, London, Group Show
• The Grand Theatre, London ON
• London Arts Council Gallery, London ON

1999
• Women’s Art Assoc., Toronto ON
• Thames Art Gallery, Chatham ON
• Galleria Mall, London ON

1998
• Gallery 54, London ON

artist statement

These paintings are “geometric landscapes”, complex abstract fields out of which emerge images-trees, faces and bodies. This work draws on the essence of traditional landscape painting, an encounter with nature, and combines it with the artist’s emotional reactions. The result is physical reality and feelings intertwined.

These paintings emerged five years ago after the artist experienced a traumatic medical event. The new work was unexpectedly abstract, and over time became more curving and energetic. The vivid color of the earlier work has developed in both its intensity and its nuances. The paintings’ range of emotions, from joy and celebration to empathy and anger, has blended with an animated sense of pictorial space.

The artist’s working process is a direct one, usually with no preliminary drawing. After the initial choice of a painting’s color and structure, the shapes change as each hue is applied. A canvas will develop as a spontaneous, free-flowing conversation between the artist and the painting, with the completed work the result of a very organic process.

A canvas may reflect both the artist’s memories and his emotions on the day that it is painted. There is a strong subconscious element to this work, with an image taking on a life of its own. These paintings are personal, expressive and musical, with their tactile use of oil paint applied with a palette knife, and their vibrant palette.

Viewers are encouraged to make their own connection to the work, and to interpret it for themselves based on their own experiences and emotions. They are invited to resonate with the paintings’ positive energy and to see something of themselves there.

commentary

Painting is philosophy made incarnate, a sense of the world embodied in visual and material form. Painting is a guide to how we might relate to the world, as if it were a newly discovered land.

In Jeff Ferst’s paintings, we encounter a world that just won’t stop whirling and scintillating. More precisely, it is made of many worlds, arcing nodes that intersect with other circles to create a myriad of connections. Each world is a kind of sphere of influence, a locus of energy, but never existing independently of the entire matrix. It is that interplay that gives Ferst’s paintings their distinctive, playful musicality.

Essential to the paintings’ structure are the blocks of color that compose the curving circuitry. These blocks, themselves often inset with concentric squares, act like the tesserae of mosaics, simultaneously creating and deconstructing form. And they give the paintings a jewel-like quality, as if reflecting light from its complex surface.

Ferst adopts as his own a visual language derived from early modernism, particularly from Cubism, and from its ecstatic variant, Orphism. But he paints gesturally with thick pigment, and with a personal passion and energy. The structure of his “geometric landscapes” is distinctly organic, form generating form with an intuitive inner logic. The image of the garden appears as a specific subject, and as an apt metaphor for Ferst’s art. He seems to be working with wild energies, and like a gardener shaping these impulses into a new state that is a melding of the natural and the aesthetic.

Within the complex fields that Ferst paints, images begin to appear. They are in a sense camouflaged, or encoded with the larger structure. An arc becomes a snake, a head appears in the overlapping of curves, faces peek from free-floating circles. Whole figures are apparent, and we become aware that Ferst’s paintings teem with people or at least the evocations of individuals. We start to see the spinning worlds of his paintings as intersecting pyches, memories and spirits.

Color plays a powerful role in these works, energizing and organizing our vision. Ferst’s hues are often intense, playing warm against cool, creating a pulsing visual experience. But he also allows olive, putty, rusty plum and other lower saturation colors to contrast with the higher key tones around them. The artist seems to be showing us something about an emotional undertow that coexists in the world along with the feelings of pleasure and joy.

—John Mendelsohn
John Mendelsohn is a painter who has written articles and reviews on contemporary art for ArtNet, Cover Magazine, dArt International and The Jewish Week, as well as essays for exhibition catalogues. He teaches in the Studio Art Program at Fairfield University in Connecticut. He has contributed to the forthcoming book, A Book of Images: Reflections on Symbols, to be published by Taschen in conjunction with the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism at the C.G. Jung Institute, New York.

education, awards & collections

Education & Awards
• New York University, BA
• Who’s Who American Universities & Colleges 1976
• Bronze Medal, Art Student’s League
• Recipient Founders Day Award

Business
• Featured in the Preston Catalogue of fashion & art, Summer 2008
• Board member Waterloo Regional Arts Council 2004-6
• Board member of Cambridge Arts Guild (Cambridge Centre for the Arts-CCA 2003-4)
• EPAC chair of CCA (2000-2004) which developed concept and execution of centre gallery space
• Board of Directors Stratford Chamber of Commerce 1992-4
• Stratford Downtown BIA Chair 1994-5, board member 1992-4
• Other volunteer and board involvement in Toronto & London Regional Art Councils
• CTV, Southwestern region, Noonday interview
• Rogers Television, Grand Living, feature segment

In private & corporate collections in the USA and Canada including:
• Grand River Hospital
• Cambridge Memorial Hospital
• BMO Nesbitt Burns
• Raymond James
• CIGI

Elected Membership
• Society of Canadian Artists