/artists/jack featherly

Hotel, God of Luck, oil and enamel on canvas, 60 x 56 inches, 2015. Image courtesy the artist and Upfor gallery.

Jack Featherly

ARTIST BIO

Jack Featherly makes paintings that are stylistically diverse and avoid presenting an “easy read.” Featherly’s imagery begins in traditions of gestural abstraction, product packaging, TV graphics and ukiyo-e, but end somewhere completely new. His meticulous craft and lack of obvious conceptual basis make for magnetic works. Featherly’s solo exhibitions include Upfor, Portland; Mesler/Feuer, Team Gallery/Jose Freire and Christopher Henry, New York; and Rena Bransten, San Francisco. Additionally, Featherly has shown in two-artist and group exhibitions throughout the United States and in France, Germany, South Korea, and Japan. Jack is represented by Upfor gallery. 

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

The ASCII paintings use an archaic visual language as a universal filter for redistributing meaning. The ASCII code on the paintings functions as literal op art and is hand-applied to incorporate the likelihood of human error. The images are combined with various types of backgrounds to stretch meaning. The ASCII paintings are titled Unpattern to reference the way our eyes sort information and look for pattern. In this case, the pattern is a variable series of keystrokes that represent dark & light, but the distribution is forever uneven in its repetition since it is applied to a representation of an object.

Other paintings in my practice employ different strategies and I’d rather address them by offering some quotes that offer more concise insight into my thinking:

Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. –ITALO CALVINO

Excerpt from: Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

I kill where I please because it is all mine. –TED HUGHES

Excerpt from: Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. –WERNHER VON BRAUN

Excerpt from: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Reception: Saturday, August 13 5–8pm

Venue: Royal Nebeker Art Gallery, Clatsop Community College

Gallery Hours: Thurs-Sat, 12pm-5pm

1799 Lexington Ave | Astoria

Website: jackfeatherly.com

Residence: Beaverton, OR

Hotel, God of Luck, oil and enamel on canvas, 60 x 56 inches, 2015. Image courtesy the artist and Upfor gallery.