Posted: September 7, 2022 by webmaster

Jason Needham Gallery Exhibition

Jason Needham – Gallery Artist

Understory – Landscape Paintings

September 1 – November 23

Kansas City painter Jason Needham finds inspiration in the overlooked corners of the Midwest. As the sun rose one recent morning, he was concentrating on a tangle of overgrown vines surrounding a stand of cottonwood trees at Kessler Park in the the city’s Historic Northeast neighborhood. (Photo/ Julie Denesha)

I’ve had a long-standing interest in impressionism, post-impressionism, and early American modernists like Marsden Hartley. All the other obvious influences apply: David Hockney, Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, among others. I’m drawing and painting scenes that are very familiar to me: forest scenes just off the beaten path, a pocket of woods with an interstate, parking lot or air-conditioned retreat just behind me. The trick is to see these mundane moments as majestic while allowing the mistakes of hand and misconceptions of eye be as present as the purposeful. I like the paintings to coalesce from a distance but upon close inspection fall apart into marks and the process of making, with the underlaying scaffolding of the image still visible. Each brushstroke becomes a single particle and the painting a wave of time-space. Whether I’m standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or staring into the corner of a room, the investment in looking is the same. On one end, I’m working areas of my brain that lie deeper than the surface stream of thoughts, the self-narrating voice. On the other end, I’m pondering the fundamental structure of reality.