| |
New Work by William Martin Jean
Opens Friday, July 10
An exhibit of new work by William Martin Jean opens at the Silver Fox
Gallery at 508 N. Main Street on Friday, July 10, with a reception for the
artist from 6 to 8 p.m.
At 7 p.m., Jean will lecture on the topic “The Importance of Art in
Setting the Stage for Life.”
An active painter, teacher and arts administrator in Cleveland, Ohio,
Jean is the founder and director of City Artists at Work, a grass roots
organization that helps to promote the Superior/St. Clair area where
many Cleveland artists live and work. He served as the Director of
Continuing Education for the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1987 until
2004.
Architecture is one of the inspirations behind Jean’s work. “The
nobility and grandeur of classical buildings continue to be a source of
inspiration to me, having experienced the space and physicality of
their presence in my travels,” Jean said.
Many of Jean’s works are abstract images of garments, strata or
textiles. “Abstraction has always been the only direction with which I
have been comfortable because it seems to let me speak to subjects
and ideas for which realism has no vocabulary,” he said.
In recent years, Jean has experimented with textural surfaces. “The
textures have an organic quality reminiscent of fossilized surfaces or
weathered walls,” Jean said. “In combination with flat passages,
these create for me a kind of visual counterpoint as in music where
rhythms play against one another.
“I like to feel that the controlled part of the work sometimes yields to
the accidental, that the spontaneous finds harmony in order.”
Jean was awarded Special Mention for Painting in the Cleveland
Museum of Art’s prestigious May Show in 1993, 1983, and 1979, and
has exhibited in many group and solo exhibitions, including: The
Cleveland Museum of Art May Shows, the Butler Institute of American
Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Boston Museum of
Fine Arts, The Cleveland Institute of Art, Lake Erie College, Ursuline
College, Hiram College, Case Western Reserve University and the
Dadian Gallery in Washington, D. C. He exhibited his work in a four-
person show in October 2004 at the Artist Archives of the Western
Reserve where he serves as board president.
Jean’s works are in many private and corporate collections. He has
held teaching grants from The Martha Holden Jennings Foundation,
the PACE organization, The Cleveland Education Foundation and the
American Council of Learned Societies. He is a graduate of Baldwin-
Wallace College and completed his graduate work at Case Western
Reserve University. He has traveled and studied extensively
throughout Europe, North Africa and Mexico.
|
