Jimmy Sheehan

Jimmy Sheehan was born and raised in upstate New York and moved to New York City at the age of 20 to study at the School of Visual Arts. He currently lives in Godeffroy, New York, where he is an art director and designer; he also teaches at the School of Visual Arts. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past decade in New York City and elsewhere.

Sheehan's painting combines elements of gestural abstraction, drawing, and iconography in a very personal expression. Simultaneously epic and intimate, his work is infused with references from his personal life as well as aspects of ancient Egyptian and Mayan civilizations. The undefined setting, in a traditional sense, is surpassed by a unique element of a pronounced outline within the figures creating a provoking source of tension. In the vein of Twombly and Basquiat, Sheehan's lexicon of various signs and marks read on a metaphorical/archetypal level rather than according to any form of traditional iconography.

School of Visual Arts