A Song For Arizona Painting

"Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter." - Paul Klee Jeff Ferst paints contemporary landscape paintings of vibrant colors and heavy impasto paint as well as abstractions. Ferst's paintings are energetic and celebratory, tactile and visual, grounded in reality and musical in feeling. Recently his work was singled out by the US State Department for its "musicality" in lightening up the residence of the US Ambassador to Dushanbe's residence "in a truly unexpected way". The ambassador called Ferst's painting "Fantasia" "The flagship piece of the exhibit." This is quite a statement when you consider the exhibit includes works by artists such as Johns, Rauschenberg and Indiana. Ferst was born in the Bronx in New York City. 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 with a BA in Fine Art. 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, where he lived until 2012. 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 six years into the landscape paintings of today.