Devorah Jacoby: She at Seager Gray Gallery

Devorah Jacoby : She

Devorah Jacoby : She

Devorah Jacoby : She October 1 - October 30, 2019 Reception for the Artist: Saturday, October 5, 5:30 to 7:30 pm Front Cover: Dandelion (detail), 2019, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 in Back Cover: Cascade, (detail), 2019, oil on canvas with charcoal, 60 x 72 in Photo Credit: Charles Kennard Direct all inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Ave. Mill Valley, CA 94941 All rights reserved.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Lucian Freud

There is no beauty, if it doesn't show some of the terribleness of life.”

Marlene Dumas

I do hope I play out the contradictions that I feel, all the anxieties and dilemmas.

If they’re there in the work, then that’s brilliant.

Jenny Saville

Cascade II

oil on canvas with charcoal, 2019 60 x 72 in

DEVORAH JACOBY : SHE Devorah Jacoby has an uncanny ability to conjure up pure emotional and psychological states in her paintings with her masterful use of paintstroke, color and composition. In “She,” her first exhibition in three years, she has put together powerhouse works that entice, challenge, delight and engage.

“My paintings are about life’s complexity,” says the artist. “Life is incredibly beautiful, lush, joyous, heartbreaking, messy and enraging.

When I am painting, I express all of that; it’s a release, it’s freeing.” The last three years for Jacoby have been an incubation period in which she has further fine-tuned her sophisticated means of expression, loosening up her painting style, becoming more and more abstract and navigating human experience. Always provocative, her paintings are both dark and light with a fearlessness that has attracted us to her work since her first exhibition in 2006.

Encapsulating all of that is the painting Cascade. It is large, 60 x 72” and is of a deep woods, dark, foreboding, welcoming and beautiful all at the same time. It is only when you look closer that you see against the black vertical of an abstracted tree, a couple, very small in scale.

They are articulated so clearly but with a bare minimum of information.

The boundaries are blurred. The couple are a part of each other and a part of everything around them. They are in it together.

In the painting, “Fire,” inspired by the California wildfires, a woman looks out on her burning home. She has lost everything. The expression on her face says it all. “This is a rare figurative work,” says artist and teacher Chester Arnold, “It seethes with feeling and represents an emotional fusion of the subject and its painter.”

Jacoby skews perspective and purposefully aims at the unexpected. In the painting Butterfly, a female figure stands in a field her arms full of luscious fruit, apples bananas and oranges. Her right arm has virtually disappeared and an apple is suspended in space on her left side and there is one on her head. She is a modern Mother Nature embracing but not able to hold on to all of life’s plenty.

In Dandelion, patches of color and loose brushstrokes define the face and hair of her subject but the eyes are carefully articulated, capturing someone in deep reflection, perhaps about impermanence and regrowth as symbolized by the dandelion pappus.

There is a physicality in many of Jacoby’s paintings, as in Daydream where the female figure has nearly dissolved into her surroundings merging with the ground and the sky around it and in the quirky and charming Green Couch an expression of the joy of being a small being on a big and inviting sofa all dressed up.

Asked for her inspirations, Jacoby refers to Lucian Freud, Marlene Dumas, Jenny Seville and the Bay Area Figurative school. She is excited about the power of abstraction, pure color and brushstroke to magnify and define the emotional content of a work. She refers to a quote by Hans Hoffman, “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

Butterfly

mixed media on boardl, 2019 24 x 18 in

- Donna Seager, 9/2019

Daydream

oil on board, 2019 36 x 36 in

Fire

oil on board, 2019 24 x 18 in

margarita

oil on canvas, 2019 30 x 30 in

Between Earth and Sky oil on canvas, 2019 40 x 40 in

Dandelion

oil on canvas, 2019 20 x 20 in

Eve II

oil on canvas, 2019 30 x 24 in

Garden

oil on canvas, 2019 30 x 30 in

Girl with Flowers IV oil on canvas, 2017 30 x 30 in

Green Couch

oil on canvas, 2019 30 x 40 in

Home

oil on canvas, 2019 36 x 36 in

Harvest

oil on canvas, 2019 24 x 36 in

Standing Together

oil on canvas, 2016 - 2019 60 x 48 in

Water’s Edge

oil on canvas, 2019 48 x 48 in

In the Forest

oil on canvas, 2019 28 x 22 in

Spring

oil on canvas, 2019 30 x 30 in

Woman with Bird

oil on canvas, 2019 30 x 30 in

Daydream II

oil on canvas, 2019 11 x 14 in

Truth

oil on canvas, 2019 30 x 30 in

Lure

oil on canvas with fishing lure, 2016 - 2019 18 x 18 in

Blue Couch

oil on board, 2019 9 x 12 in

Devorah Jacoby Education:

1998-Current Extensive Post Graduate at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,

California College of the Arts and Crafts San Francisco Art Institute 1995: M. A. Psychology, University of San Francisco,

San Francisco, CA 1994: Cert. Art Therapy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 1988: B.A. University of San Francisco, San Francisco

Exhibition History: 2019

Solo Exhibition, She, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA Seattle Art Fair, with Seager Gray Gallery Seattle, WA

2017

Solo Exhibition, Ziff Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

2016

Solo Exhibition, unearthed, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA Summer Salon, Powder and Smoke, Seager

Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA San Francisco artMRKT, San Francisco, CA

2014:

Group Exhibition: Women’s Work with Inez Storer, Lisa Kokin, Emily Payne & Nancy Legge, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA

2013:

Solo Show, Mysterious Barricades, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA Group Exhibition: Art Market, San Francisco Seager Gray Gallery, San Rafael, CA

2012:

Miami Invitational Art Fair, Seager Gray Gallery

2011:

Brooklyn Waterfront Arts Coalition, Wide Open II National Art Show finalist, Brooklyn, NY Juror, Nathan Trotman, Curator

2010:

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Two-person show, Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery, Sag Harbor, New York.

AQUA 10, Donna Seager Gallery, Miami, FL Solo Show, Friends, Family and Other Misfits, Donna Seager Gallery, San Rafael, CA San Francisco International Art Expo, San Francisco

2008:

Solo show, Donna Seager Gallery, San Rafael, CA

2007:

1st place Juror’s Award granted by Stephen Haller, Stephen Haller Gallery, New York, NY 8th Annual National Exhibition, Kauffman Gallery, Shippensburg Univ., Shippensburg PA Miami Invitational Art Fair, FLOW Exhibition, Dorset Hotel, Miami Beach, FL Donna Seager Gallery, Group Show, San Rafael

2006:

Alameda Art Center National Juried Exhibition (granted 1st place Juror’s Award by painting curator Janet Bishop of SF Museum of Modern Art), Alameda, CA Donna Seager Gallery, Solo Show, San Rafael Donna Seager Gallery, Group Show, San Rafael,

2005:

Schoonmaker Open Studios, Sausalito, CA Spin Gallery, San Rafael, CA CFA Gallery, San Anselmo, CA San Francisco International Art Expo, San Francisco

2004:

Schoonmaker Open Studios, Sausalito, CA Marin Art Council Open Studios, Sausalito, CA Falkirk Juried Exhibition, San Rafael, CA

2003:

Marin Art Council Open Studios, Sausalito, CA Schoonmaker Open Studios, Sausalito, CA

2002:

Juried Exhibition, College of Marin, Kentfield, CA

2001:

Juried Exhibition, College of Marin, Kentfield, CA