KATHRYN JACOBI | SLEEPWALKING
Through the Apocalypse
KATHRYN JACOBI VITA
Born New York, NY 1947
Paintings, Drawings, Graphics, Photography
M.A. 1980, (B.A. 1978); California State University, Northridge
Kathryn Jacobi is a classically trained, contemporary realist painter, printmaker, and photographer who has been working professionally for over 40 years, exhibiting in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Kathryn Jacobi © All rights reserved.
As an artist, she has always worked on two consecutive bodies of paintings that are distinct and separate from each other.
The first group is from direct observation or based on old photographs and relates to her world experience.
The second group derives from her imagination, the paintings collectively weaving a narrative of her inner life and its journeys. Over the past decade, she has also become more and more intrigued with the creative possibilities for making images inherent in digital photography and the computer darkroom.
Now, it considers this the third avenue of practice and exploration.
Kathryn was born in Manhattan in 1947.
She attended UCLA, UC Berkeley, and California State University Northridge, where she received her BA in 1978 and her MA in 1980.
While Kathryn has spent much of her life in California (she presently lives in Santa Monica and has a studio in Los Angeles), she has also spent much of the past 2 decades in the forests of British Columbia, where she had a second home and studios.
Over my life as an artist, I have worked on two simultaneous and occasionally overlapping bodies of work.
The first derives from direct observation of the “real” world as I find it. My primary interest here is portraiture (in the broadest sense), and even my still lifes derive from that exacting scrutiny.
Whether working from sittings, objects, or from photographs, in these representational, more traditional paintings, my aim is fidelity to the specific subject. The second body of work comes from the inside out. It bypasses rational observation, instead of being an imagined response to the world as I find it.
Kathryn Jacobi © All rights reserved.
The unifying concerns that tie both bodies of work together are the constant themes of memory, transformation, and fate’s vagaries. More generally, my images form an exploration of the human condition in the context of our moment in time.
My interpretation is the variable, and I attempt to cast an objective eye while being deeply moved by our native frailty and vulnerability.
These themes have been a constant thread of fascination for me over almost half a century as a working artist. I’ve depicted people in every stage of their lives, singly and in families, and continue to believe that the inner life is reflected in external signs: how we age, how the child becomes the old man or woman, what remains vital throughout life.
96”144”.
Oil on canvas. 2019
Kathryn Jacobi © All rights reserved.
Among my most recent paintings are the first two of a triptych in progress called Sleepwalking Through the Apocalypse.
They are Sleepers and Tree, both large diptychs (96″ x144″, and 144″ x96″ respectively); they are history paintings, looking at how people have traditionally responded to anxiety in the face of overwhelming external distress, but the underlying metaphor of Sleepwalking is about the way in which people shut off their access to anxiety about forces beyond their control.
In the face of a real threat, we sleepwalk or go through our lives’ motions without acknowledging the weight of our fears. The paintings are about the numbing of our emotional responses to persistent threats.
They are also about the courage of persistence in the face of peril. The human procession continues, the blind leading the blind while heads are raining from the sky.
