Jeff Bellerose: City Forms

Jeff Bellerose City Forms

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Jeff Bellerose City Forms February 28 - April 22, 2023

645 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94133 415.434.3055 | www.paulthiebaudgallery.com

Foreword Mounting exhibitions of great art is one of the joys of working in an art gallery. Jeff Bellerose’s exhibition City Forms did not disappoint. Comprised of paintings made between 2019 and 2023, the show reveals Bellerose’s continual love of travel, and of observing the world around him. Among the destinations depicted are scenes in Rome, Naples, Positano, the coast of Southern Italy, as well as the streets of Paris, New York, and Chicago. Closer to home, Bellerose is equally enamored of the urban architecture and vistas of San Francisco, several of which have been included in the show along with a group of interior scenes from places important to him.

Not to be limited to urban cityscapes, Bellerose is also interested in the natural world. Making their debut in the exhibition is a series of dynamic beachscapes of crashing waves along the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Also featured is an expansive view of mountain tops Bellerose witnessed during a backpacking trip near Mount Lassen in Northern California.

During the opening reception for his exhibition earlier this year, Bellerose participated in an artist talk with Sara Wessen Chang about how he became an artist and what inspires him to paint the subjects he presents. On the following pages you will find a record of their conversation and the subsequent audience Q&A that has been edited for length and clarity.

I hope you find it as revealing as I have.

Special thanks are owed to Sara Wessen Chang for participating in the discussion, the Paul Thiebaud Gallery team for organizing the exhibition and talk, and to the many gallery supporters and fans of Jeff Bellerose’s work who joined us that day for the opening. Thank you!

Greg Flood November 2023

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Jeff Bellerose in Conversation With Sara Wessen Chang Saturday, April 1, 2023

Sara Wessen Chang: Welcome, my name is Sara Wessen Chang, and I had the pleasure of putting together this show with Jeff Bellerose. The exhibition is called City Forms and is on view through April 22, 2023. This first gallery contains a range of local cityscapes depicting San Francisco, along with interior scenes. My first question, Jeff, is about your artistic process. How do you get started? Do you walk around the city taking snapshots?

Jeff Bellerose: Hello and thank you, Sara. I like to walk around with sketchbooks. I do a lot of sketchbook work in watercolors and making drawings. From there, I usually begin paintings using a combination of watercolors, drawings, sketches, and/or photos. I occasionally do the oil paintings outside, but not much. It is better for me to do a quick watercolor.

SWC: Looking at your paintings, many of them are city forms either of residential buildings in New York City, Chicago, or San Francisco, or they are of urban infrastructure in these cities.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about your education in physics and engineering and how that informs your perspective on these forms?

JB: Well, that is a leading question because I don’t know if it does have an influence. I grew up painting – my parents were painters – so I have painted seemingly for forever. Then I decided to go to school for physics and still paint. I also studied engineering, which is maybe the most practical, or useful thing I took classes in. Personally, the interesting part of physics is the theory part of it, where you are looking at the world and observing. That idea of looking at the world is something meaningful to me.

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Alley, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Façade, 2019, oil on board, 12 x 16 inches

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Last Exit, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Arrival, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Exiting, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Downtown, 2021, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

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Levels, 2019, oil on board, 16 x 12 inches

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SWC: I was just reading your bio and I think everyone would love to hear more about your time with the Harvard Cyclotron lab before you dove into your painting career.

JB: I worked for the Harvard Cyclotron lab in Boston, which is a proton radiation treatment facility. Eventually, I quit that and painted full-time for several years. Then I ended up working at UCSF in Radiation Oncology, where we design plans on how to cure patients with cancer utilizing radiation. It is what I do during the day, but I still paint all morning before going to work.

SWC: All of these works have been painted in the last couple of years, and in them there is an absence of figures. Some are more noticeable than others, but do you want to talk a little bit about that? Do you intentionally omit figures from your paintings?

JB: Yes I do leave them out intentionally, but I actually like painting people. One of my previous shows at Paul Thiebaud Gallery was all people, but they are often more specifically about the person I was painting. When you see a lot of cityscapes and there are people in them, it means something different. They embody the hustle and bustle, movement, and motion of the moment. I am not as interested in that aspect of city paintings as I am about what is behind that, and the permanence of place. I find that putting people into it changes the feel of a painting. I prefer the sense of quiet solitude. Part of this desire came from my experiences backpacking, and that late part of the day when you are in canyon and the light gives you a strong sense of space. That feeling is in the city, too, but it is crowded in with cars and people. My paintings look at what is behind that.

SWC: In many of the paintings, there is this contrast between the man-made objects and the light, which is what adds so much life to your work. Many people refer to your work as having a Vermeer quality to it, because his work is so sensitive to light and shadow. Many of the paintings in the exhibition have a dark foreground and a light background. Do you find Vermeer an influence? How do you feel about that comparison?

JB: Of course, I love Vermeer. The biggest thing for me is the mood of the painting, which is part of what the sketchbooks are for. I walk around the city or landscape looking for moments of atmosphere and light that speak to me, that capture a sense of place. In regards to the use of light and dark, I like contrast and strong light, which is why they are backlit.

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New York Geometry, 2022, oil on board, 14 x 11 inches

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Booth, 2021, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

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SWC: On this wall you have a selection of intimate interior scenes. There is the work titled Booth and a few other scenes from different locations. Do you want to tell us a little bit about those spaces and what they mean to you?

JB: Sure. Booth and Chrome are paintings of a diner in Truckee, up near Tahoe. Spring is actually our living room in Oakland, where we live. Living Room is my parent’s house where I grew up, which is why all my paintings are on the wall. I love interiors and I like diners. They are kind of hard to do because you have to find the right space. You are not allowed to just paint everybody’s home. But, there is something about the light in interior spaces, which is why I really like doing them.

Visitor: What do you listen to while you paint?

JB: I listen to a lot of very noisy modern jazz. My friends who go to concerts with me claim that the music seems like the complete opposite of my paintings. I always listen to music, though. I am very obsessed with music.

Visitor: Who are some of your influences besides Vermeer?

JB: Oh, there are a lot. Growing up, there was Sargent and Homer, but there are a lot of modern artists I really like. Thiebaud is amazing. Diebenkorn, too.

SWC: There are expressionist tendencies in some of your paintings as well. It varies from painting to painting - some are much more detailed and realistic, whereas there are others that have much more impressionist brushwork. What informs that choice of technique? Is it just the scene? Or your mood?

JB: A lot of times I work in groups, like three paintings to get some ideas of a place or thing.

Then, I will end up doing something like 10-20 paintings that are related by an idea or place.

After doing those, I will do something very different, like landscapes for a little while. Then, when I go back to doing something like cityscapes, it feels different. I like painting different things. When I come back to a genre of my paintings, they are informed a little bit by what has happened in the studio since I last painted them.

SWC: Moving to the second gallery, the subject matter of these paintings is from your travels abroad. Please tell us a little bit about these trips, where were they, and what inspired you?

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JB: My girlfriend is European and so we go to Europe as often as we can. Several of these are from Italy, and all painters love Italy. The landscape is gorgeous, the light is amazing, the architecture, everything about it. But, there is also something about the way it looks. When we go, we just walk around. That is all we do, we walk around and see the places. I always bring sketchbooks with me and do a lot of sketchbook painting in watercolors and ink. Then we come back, and I work on things in the studio. A number of these paintings are from a trip we took through Southern Italy. Looking around, you see the walls decay beautifully, and everything falls apart beautifully over time. Painting that is fun because I can pull in some different painting techniques and play with the textures. The walls have so many layers of texture, and that brings in a different aspect to how I paint it.

SWC: I love this wall of Italian scenes, and especially the mix of perspective. I think you do a really beautiful job of pulling perspective, even in detailed works, like Façade, and how the shadows fall on the side of the building. Façade is a great example of how you experiment with brushwork to create texture. There is also a selection of Parisian scenes on the other wall, which use perspective in a different way. My favorites are this suite of night scenes, which, I think, are also Italy? Is that right?

JB: Yes, those are from a recent trip to Napoli, and they are some of the most recent paintings that I have done. Shockingly, they have people in them. I know that is a little weird, but there is something about them… I mean, Naples has an amazing energy and vibrancy, but it is also dirty and run down. It is hard to really remove it from the people because of that feeling of it being alive.

Visitor: How big is your studio?

JB: It is maybe a little more than half the size of this room. We live in Oakland, so I have a studio in my backyard that is a dedicated studio space. It has French doors that look out into the garden, and it is substantially overcrowded and messy at the moment, but it is a great place to work.

SWC: Before we open up to questions, in our small gallery, we have a selection of small paintings of waves, beach scenes, and one mountain-scape. Please tell us a little bit about these works.

JB: The wave paintings are recent, from last year or two. I grew up outside of Boston in a small town, and I go back every summer to see my family and go to the beach for a

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Late Light, 2022, oil on board, 11 x 14 inches

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Living Room, 2020, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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couple weeks. We have done that every year of my life. I take a ton of sketchbooks and do watercolors while I am there, so a lot of these paintings come from those trips. We just go to the beach, sit there for the day, and do nothing but swim, paint, and eat. The mountain painting is from one of my backpacking trips.

SWC: Do you spend a lot of time backpacking as well?

JB: I used to backpack and then I let it go for years. When I tried to do it last year, I was like ‘God, I guess I am not twenty-eight anymore.’ It was exhausting, torture. I do not know if I would say I still do it, but… I should. That image is from Mt. Lassen, which is where we went.

SWC: Great. Thank you so much. Does anyone have any questions for Jeff?

Visitor: Do you like listening to music or painting more?

JB: That would be an insider question. I definitely like painting more, but I love music. I go to a lot of music shows, so I always listen to music while I paint.

Visitor: If you were going to go to the Louvre, where would you spend most of your time?

JB: In the Louvre? I love going to museums, but I also just love walking around cities. I am trying to think of what struck me most last time we were there. There are some very old paintings from the pre-Renaissance, and there is a huge one that is in one of the passageways with all these spears and it is very graphic. I cannot remember the name of the painter, though I like paintings with strong perspective. Sometimes there are these city paintings and the perspective is very strange because they were made before they invented modern perspective. They are very twisted, but also fascinating.

Visitor: It seems like you are at home with any medium. Do you have a favorite?

JB: I love oils. I used to do a lot of finished watercolors, particularly when I lived in Oregon for a couple of years. I still love watercolors, but I do mostly use them for sketching and preparatory stuff. There is something about oils that I really like. I can spend time with a painting and can work and rework it. There is a lot of flexibility.

Visitor: Do you ever do really large format paintings? What is the biggest painting you have done?

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JB: I actually really like doing big paintings, but storage is always a problem. Sometimes I would do paintings about this large, but I have also done some paintings that are six feet by four feet.

Visitor: Do you have a particular place where you start, like in the center? Or do you work from the outside in? Or does it vary?

JB: With each painting, I do it a little bit different. Oftentimes, I block it in very loosely. Part of what I like about it is the shapes; the contrast and shapes are the first things that strike me.

When I first started doing cityscapes I really liked Franz Kline – the abstract painter. There is something about the way he uses black and white shapes, and their boldness, that resonates with me. I often start my paintings using a grey and block in sections loose and drippy, and then work from there. I have seen painters who start at the top corner and paint every single detail all the way down and I do not know how they do that.

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Spring, 2021, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

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Chrome, 2022, oil on board, 13 x 18 inches

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Corner, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Intersection, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Hill, 2021, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

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Crossing, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Nightlife, 2023, oil on board, 12 x 9 inches

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Nocturne − Napoli, 2023, oil on board, 12 x 9 inches

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Stone, 2018, oil on board, 16 x 12 inches

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Lone, 2018, oil on board, 16 x 12 inches

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Strada, 2019, oil on board, 16 x 12 inches

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Piazza, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Assembly, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Balcony, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Southern, 2020, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

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Worn, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Decay, 2019, oil on board, 15 x 15 inches

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Sea and Sky, 2019, oil on board, 12 x 16 inches

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Seaside, 2022, oil on board, 11 x 14 inches

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West, 2023, oil on board, 9 x 12 inches

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Surf, 2021, oil on board, 10 x 10 inches

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Crash, 2022, oil on board, 10 x 10 inches

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Long Wave, 2022, oil on board, 13 x 30 inches

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White, 2022, oil on board, 10 x 10 inches

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Fog, 2021, oil on board, 10 x 10 inches

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JEFF BELLEROSE Born 1973 in Boston, Massachusetts Education 1995

BS Tufts University, Medford, MA Summa Cum Laude in Physics and Mechanical Engineering

Awards and Juried Shows 2010 2009

Best of San Francisco 2010, SF Weekly’s Art Department Bet You Can’t Paint A Portrait, 3rd Place, juried by Theophilus Brown, ArtSpace 712, San Francisco, CA

Solo Exhibitions 2023 Jeff Bellerose: City Forms, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2019 Jeff Bellerose: Cities & Interiors, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2017 Jeff Bellerose, Lowney Architecture, Oakland, CA Jeff Bellerose: Narratives, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2014 Jeff Bellerose: An Introduction - Recent Paintings, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2012 Framed, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2011 Light, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2009 Inside Out, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2008 Urban Geometry, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2007 Urban Noir, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2006 New Works, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2005 New Works, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2004 Wired, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2003 Stillness in the City, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2002 Vistas, James Gallery, Norwell, MA 1999 Southwest/Northeast, Harvard Neighbors Gallery, Cambridge, MA Selected Group Exhibitions 2017 Reference, Rose Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2015 EXPO Chicago, Festival Hall, Navy Pier, Chicago, IL artMRKT San Francisco, Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA 2014 20th Anniversary Show – Small Treasures, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA Art Miami, Art Miami Pavilion, Wynwood Arts District, Miami, FL Paso Artsfest, Signature Exhibition, Studios on the Park, Paso Robles, CA

Annual Painting Sale, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2013 Holiday Group Show, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Summertime, Skidmore Contemporary Art, Santa Monica, CA

L.A. Paintings, Skidmore Contemporary Art, Santa Monica, CA

The Gowanus Show, Littlefield Art Space, Brooklyn, NY Single Fare 3, RH Gallery, New York, NY 2012 Artistic Visions of the Golden Gate Bridge, George Krevsky Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2011 Annual Painting Sale, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2010 Small Treasures, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Painting Dark City, Orchestra Unleashed, N. Hollywood, CA Summertime, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 70

2009 Bet You Can’t Paint a Portrait, Juried Show, ArtSpace 712, San Francisco, CA Summer Group Show, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Doorways, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2008 Small Treasures, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2007 Alta Plaza Park, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA Summertime, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2006 Small Treasures, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2004 Still Lifes, Thomas Reynolds Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2002 Group Show, Gottlieb Gallery, Portland, OR Northwestern Landscapes, Lakewood Center for the Arts, Lake Oswego, OR 2001-2 Habitat, Robert Canaga Gallery, Portland, OR

Landscapes, Yoshida’s Fine Arts Gallery, Portland, OR Commisions 2001 17 watercolors commemorating the opening of the expanded Japanese Gardens, Morikami Museum, Delray Beach, FL Publications 2015

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Curiel, Jonathan, “Wall Art at Walmart - Street art and the art of streetscapes, at two new exhibits”, SF Weekly, Aug. 27 - Sept. 2, 2015, Volume 34, Number 32, San Francisco, CA. Musumeci, Natalie, “Impressions of Gowanus: Painters Make the Canal Warehouses Subject of Art Show,” www.brooklyndaily.com, May 2013.

Bellerose, Jeff. Casting Shadows, Norfolk Press, San Francisco, CA.

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Cover: Crossing (detail), 2019 Rear Cover: Seaside (detail), 2022 Copyright 2023 Paul Thiebaud Gallery. All Rights Reserved.

Images copyright 2023 Jeff Bellerose.

Design: Greg Flood and Matthew Miller All images, except as noted below, photo: Ekaterina Izmestyeva pgs. 42, 43, 58 photo: Matthew Miller No portion of this document may be reproduced or stored without the express written permission of the copyright holder(s).

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