Jesse Thomas 
Paintings and Drawings
  • Ink and Oil
  • Entourer
  • Keystone Confederates 2017
    • Keystone Editions gallery Berlin installation
    • Keystone Confederates Scott Gallery Edmonton Install
  • Aesthetic Histories Exhibition at Zhengzhou University of Light Industry
  • The Order of Things 2016
  • Def Perspectives/Songs from the Labyrinth 2014/2015
    • def Words
    • Install Shots: Def Perspectives and Songs from the Labyrinth
  • Gold Ochre 2013
    • Super-Spy Statement
    • Drawings and Studies from my 1st Year in Edmonton
  • Paintings 2012/2014
    • Nightmare Aftre Aertsen
  • Paintings 2009 - 2011: The Cerulean Brigade
    • The Cerulean Brigade/ Interior Conspiracy
  • cv
Jesse Thomas

Super Spy Narratives: Paintings of Drawings of Prints

I have recently finished my first year of teaching Painting in the Department of Art and Design at the U of A. Prior to this, I had been teaching painting, drawing and design at Washington University in St Louis.

During my first month in Edmonton I made a set of drawings using rapidograph pens on Bristol board. They were informed first by the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. From there, the compositions developed as places were imagined, assembled, and discovered, then populated by characters released from dreams and memory. Emergent narrative themes lean toward the cinematic, grounded in science fiction and espionage.

Each composition investigates the interior geometry of pictorial space, shaped by my experiences of architecture inside and out. I’m using this structure to build paintings with the alchemical nature of the medium in mind: pigments of animal, vegetable, and mineral origin suspended in linseed oil and refined pine sap. The process allows me the chance to go deep into the visual: finding and creating colorspace energy, looking for temperature and depth, generating a site of balance and resolution.

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