TOM: Let’s talk voodoo paintings. Of all the paintings in your new series “Voodoo Wedding”, do you have a favorite?

GIL: Well, since the show is so personal and is so wrapped up in my life and my experiences over the last few years, if I think about it my favorite piece will change based on my mood. I have maybe a dozen pieces in the show that are my favorites and some of them have very involved, emotional stories behind them. But when you asked me that question, the one that popped into my head is “That’s When I’ll Come Back To You.”…

Click here to read the full interview…

(click for full size)

Click here to read the article on the Sun’s website

Gil and Tracey appeared on WYPR’s Maryland Morning with Tom Hall to discuss “Voodoo Wedding” and some of the experiences that inspired it. Listen to the full interview below

Click here for more information on “Voodoo Wedding.”

You can watch the video – and learn about BARCS – here

Click here to read Tracey’s article

Must Love Dogs
By: Marianne Amoss
Photo: Jason Okutake

Excerpt
In 2004, Gil Jawetz and his girlfriend were living in New York; he was working at a new media company, while she was working as a freelance writer. Inspired by her research into Norman Rockwell, he took a figure oil painting class at the Art Students League. He’d been drawing his whole life, secretly filling sketchbooks with drawings of people riding the subway. But that year, he began painting in earnest—often depicting his and his friends’ pets.

In 2005, Jawetz and his girlfriend moved back to Baltimore, where he’d attended Hopkins as an undergraduate. Now he works in a small studio off York Road in Homeland, not far from Christine Merrill’s house. (They met while, yes, walking their dogs). His canvases are hung on the walls and propped up on easels, and a few art books—Lucian Freud, Egon Schiele—sit on a bookshelf. Jawetz, who paints with oils, often references their work, and that of others like Rembrandt and Degas, for their well-rendered paintings of dogs. “It’s awesome for me to look at that tradition,” he says. “How did Rembrandt paint a dog? Why did he put it in there? It’s exciting to look at the history of art and not think this is a cheesy, kitschy thing.”

He often paints his own pets—Pete, a white shepherd lab mix he found in a park, and three cats: the Count, Mr. Darcy, and Pepe. Jawetz also does commissioned paintings of other people’s animals. “The techniques [of portraiture] haven’t changed for centuries,” he says. “To some, figurative work is so old-fashioned. But there is an endless amount of figurative imagery to create and explore.” He tries to get to know his subjects before painting them, then communicate their personalities through his technique. His loose brushstrokes impart a sense of motion—an overall idea of the animal, rather than a detailed picture. “It’s the impression rather than the accuracy of form,” he says. “It’s more true to the subject.”

It takes Jawetz four to five weeks to do a commission. He first photographs the pet and meets the family, then does sketches before moving on to canvas—all the while coordinating with the client to make sure the “soul” of the painting is right. “When someone says my dog died or I just adopted [one], I feel it,” he says. “I want to get a sense of where they’re coming from and use that.” Jawetz’s prices, based on size, range from several hundred dollars to about $2,000. Jawetz also works with area rescue organizations, often donating a painting to their fundraising events. “I’m a pet person,” he says. “I wouldn’t do this if I weren’t.”

In 2007, he hung a solo show of dog paintings for the grand opening of the Yellow Dog Tavern in Canton. This month, to celebrate the bar’s one-year anniversary, he’s exhibiting a new series of pet paintings there. Called Human(e) Beings, the show will depict animals with their humans—an attempt to explore that easy-to-feel but hard-to-express pet-owner relationship. “It’s very hard to talk about,” he says. “It’s very intimate. They know you in ways that we probably can’t understand. They would know the most miniscule inflection in your voice or some gesture that you make that you’re not even aware that you do. Trying to capture that relationship is a pretty cool challenge.”

To read the entire article, click here.

If you have trouble watching the video here please follow this link.

Stills of my work on the salon walls during segments featuring hosts Rhea Feikin and Nate Howard

more press

I made two appearances on the Fox45 Morning News
with Jennifer Gladstone and Patrice Harris
to discuss my Big Dogs show.

If you have trouble watching the video here please follow this link.

Baltimore’s CBS-affiliate WJZ visited my solo show BIG DOGS and took a look at some of the work.

If you have trouble watching the video here please follow this link.

Click here for the WJZ video page.

For more on the BIG DOGS show click here.

5/16/2007

The Arts | Visual Arts

Waking Life Painting

Baltimore County Artist Group Mounts Its Debut Show

By J. Bowers

A good nude is hard to find. Sure, it’s reasonably easy to persuade someone to disrobe, but even if an artist’s friends and loved ones are willing to go the full monty in the name of art, they’ll soon find that it takes exceptional patience to remain frozen in place for hours on end. Life painting is one of art’s most time-honored traditions, though, and there will always be a stream of aspiring Renoirs and Vermeers eager to give it a shot.

For the past year, the Towson Artists Group, operating out of the surprisingly cavernous Towson Framing Gallery basement, has provided local artists with extended opportunities to work from live models. Meeting for three hours every Tuesday night at $8 per session, the group gives its members a chance to spend nine hours painting or drawing a live model, with a new model every three weeks.

As a result, the group’s first anniversary show offers you a chance to see the same models painted in a diverse range of personal styles. It’s more intriguing than it sounds. Various interpretations of one person’s nine-hour pose allows you to piece together a far richer idea of what that person truly looks like in real life, and the group’s styles vary enough to maintain interest throughout the exhibit.

Hung to advantage on a bright red wall, John E.C.’s monochromatic nudes are sketched with thin black lines, presented on burnished fields of bronze, gold, and dirty silver. Almost sculptural in composition, his subjects’ rounded hips owe more than a little to classical studies of the human form. Still, there’s an undeniable sense of modernity surrounding his untitled works–most likely due to his judicious use of angular, crosshatched lines, which stand in for shadows.

While John E.C. appears more occupied with the study of the human form as an object, the majority of the artists in the show are invested in the über-specific art of character study. Andy Holzopfel’s “Mohawk” is a detail-faithful rendering of a Rubenesque punk-rock chick, her blue hair a bold coxcomb on her shaven head. There are numerous variations on a mysterious brunette called “Rebecca,” including Sandra Getlein’s lovely like-titled homage to Matisse. The model appears calm and kind in Getlein’s painting, the welcome flip side of Holzopfel’s “Rebecca #2,” which stares at the viewer with stern, chilly eyes.

Rebecca Cason’s whimsical interpretations frequently place her nude subjects on fields of rich, jewel-like color, transforming them into something more than a naked person posing in a studio. “Luna” is a woman floating among stylized moons, their soft curves echoing her hips and breasts. In “Morning Dream of Flowers,” an overarching semicircle frames a reclining nude in a bower of blooms. All very safe and unchallenging, but beautiful to look at.

Errol Roberts’ shoulders-up portraits would look right at home in a 19th-century British estate. Like John E.C., Roberts focuses on the timelessness of the naked figure–free of clothing, makeup, or other defining clues to place or era, he concentrates on the form itself. In “Nia,” a portrait of a black woman wearing a turban, elaborate costume earrings are the only concession to modernity. “Rebecca” is transformed into a European noblewoman startled at her repose.

Joanna Barnum, the show’s sole watercolorist, uses her life-painting sessions as a springboard to create her own mythologically inspired nudes. The paintings done with the Towson Artists Group are lumped under the bland title “Life Paintings,” while “Hecate” is an iconic image of the three-faced Greek goddess, clutching her symbolic sword, torch, and key. “Hypnos and Thanatos” could veer into Dungeons and Dragons territory, but instead it is an impressively detailed tableau of death and sleep, accompanied by horse, wolf, and snake heads.

Though heavy on life drawing and painting, this exhibit features a smattering of landscapes, still lifes, and visions of a more personal nature. The aforementioned Getlein’s landscapes are markedly less successful than her live-model work. Her daubed-on trees have an unfortunate Bob Ross/paint-by-number quality.

Gil Jawetz, clearly a jazz fan, offers oil portraits of Louis Armstrong and a brass band jamming in “Preservation Hall,” but his candid paintings of his dog and goldfish possess a genuine warmth and realism not seen in his other works. “Pete and Edgar” is an overhead shot of a white dog lying on the floor. His eyes are liquid, and his belly is shaded with the barest hint of blue, lending the image a slightly fantastic quality. On a nearby table, the goldfish is an orange blur inside his extremely convincing glass bowl. The fish’s solo turn, “Edgar,” is a tiny yet charming portrait, the fish’s tail captured midstroke with adeptly smudged paint.

Despite a 14-artist roster, the Towson Artists Group show does not feel overcrowded or boxed-in, though the canvases are squeezed into a comparatively small exhibition space. The work is of varying quality, but the endless variations on identical models conjure up visions of Parisian life-drawing salons and classic portraiture.

Original link | More show info

For more information on the show please visit their website.

Gothamist.com

Urbanhound.com