Autumn Hillside Painting

Colourist, explorer, lover of México. 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. 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. The world according to Ferst is completely colourful and throughout his career he has painted the full spectrum of colour. From early days painting landscape to this series of 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 30 plus years into the landscape paintings of today. 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 across the U.S., Canada and overseas and is in numerous private and corporate collections. The artist is an Elected Member of the Canadian Society of Artists and The Colour & Form Society as well as the National Oil Painters Association. Ferst discovered México in the 1980's but did not really understand this amazing country until he moved there in 2017. Lis paintings have found a home here and recently he branched out into weavings that convoy this visión and love of colour. The culture, the people, the life he now lives is incredíble rich and meaningful all thanks to the country he now calls home.