open for First Thursday Pioneer Square Artwalk

jason@jasonshogreen.com
206.778.0839

BIO:

Born in Japan and raised outside of Atlanta, young me never wanted to be an artist. I grew up in the South - the "Newt Gingrich is going to come speak to our class today" South. Doodling was my escape - I never took an art class but was constantly drawing out of my head - never from reality. I ended up at the University of Washington, then with an Electrical Engineering degree. On the week prior to my graduation I looked around in lab (my 3rd straight night spending the night in lab) and realized that people were having fun. I was miserable. The week following graduation I got my first devoted sketchbook. I quickly became obsessed, drawing for hours each day, dabbling in web design, graphic design, crafts, and illustration. When a self-published project gained publicity I was offered art shows in LA and Philadelphia. 4 weeks before my first show opening, began to paint because I thought that's what people do in galleries - I'd only visited a few. The opening was something between a disaster and a huge success and that was it.

This past year I studied figurative painting at Gage Academy. I won 1st Place in the Landscape competition at the end of year show for my first and so far only landscape, Somewhere 2 People are Falling in Love.

Currently I'm painting every day, I have a line of teeshirts being released this summer, a vinyl toy from SuperRad toys, and preparing to apply to a handful of MFA programs.

STATEMENT

My paintings are based on the space where dreams and mythology mix with fragmented memories and create something where you forget which ingredient belongs where. When I begin a painting I usually don't have a specific image in mind - more a feeling. As I paint I am continually carving away at that feeling until it appears on the canvas. I have a story in my head but try not to spell it out too exactly - there is more reward to having a conversation with a painting rather than to receive a lecture. I always hope for my paintings to appeal to children and regular people along with the art crowd. The art scene is so insular that it's often too easy to create work that only a small percentage of the population can appreciate. For me art is escapism. It's therapy. It's entertainment.

I employ my background in illustration, graphic design, and character design frequently in my paintings as a shorthand for realism. We live in this age with so much visual media - television, photography, advertising, that I feel the need to use their weapons to compete for attention - chroma, movement, scale, humor. Through the past few years my work has evolved from cartoons to small, stiff monochromatic paintings on wood, to large colorful canvases and groupings of small paintings. I'm dealing with the same subject matter, but learning my method of storytelling - Choose Your Own Adventures, I suppose.

LINKS