Jeff Cohen
Gallery Affiliations: Julie Nester Gallery, Pryor Fine Art, Stricoff Fine Art
Region: South
I am fascinated by the layers of chaos and order that I see everywhere. It's the relationship between the chaos of blizzard and the ordered structure of a snowflake. My paintings serve as a metaphor for this effect.
The grid formed by the square tiles in my paintings provide a layer of order. This gives the painting a photographic effect as the mind composites the image from the individual squares. The tiles are each rendered independently of each other, adding a layer of chaos. Order returns within each painted tile, but breaks down into chaos again as I use a loose, lively stroke when rendering each square.
I didn't come up with this theory and plan my art around it. Rather, as my technique has evolved my understanding of this relationship between chaos and order has evolved along with it - which goes back into the art.