Busacca Gallery

Essentially Jazz by artist Jeff Ferst: Abstract work based on musical themes and a vist to New York City. Ferst' 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. 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. • Graduate of New York University, Fine Arts Department • Bronze Medal recipient, Art Students League • Whose Who American Universities and Colleges • Elected member Society of Canadian Artists (SCA) • Invitee Bienniale Inernazionale Dell Arte Contemporanea, 
Florence Italy 2009 • Preston Catalogue, Summer 2008 • Work in private and corporate collections in Canada & the U.S. Some include: The Cambridge Memorial Hospital, The Grand River Hospital, CIGI, & many others.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_art

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.[2]



Abstract art, nonfigurative art, nonobjective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related terms. They are similar, although perhaps not of identical meaning.



Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be only slight, or it can be partial, or it can be complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art often contains partial abstraction.



Both Geometric abstraction and Lyrical Abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which blatantly alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.