Jeffrey Gold

Jeffrey Gold

Painter Jeffrey Gold was born in Los Angeles in 1958 and continues to live and work in his native city. Graduating from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1983, his greatest individual artistic influence has been his former teacher Charles Bell, who died in 1995 yet whose extraordinary body of work and indefatigable mentorship remains indelibly inculcated in Gold's mind and experience. Just as Bell once stated how he was "concerned with feelings we share about familiar objects", Gold reflects both his powerful understanding of his predecessor's work and respect for him as a person in his own painting Still Life, Homage to Charles Bell.

When living and working in Rome in the early 1990's, Gold immersed himself in the cultural aspects of the Eternal City. His visits to the Villa Borghese inspired an ongoing love affair with the still life work of Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, whose dramatic use of light continues to awe and inspire Gold. Yet it was his strolls through the bustling vegetable, fruit and flower markets of Trastevere and Piazza Campo dei Fiori that honed his eye on still life as an irresistible subject matter.

The objects which appear in such still lifes and which give literal and metaphoric support to his immaculate flowers and fruit, such as the modernist red vase in his Still Life with Yellow Tulips, were all owned at one point or another by the artist and cherished by him. Thus a magical equipoise is preserved between the meticulousness of his renderings and the loving sentimentality and spiritual peace imbued in his forms.

Peace and love are recurring themes in Gold's portrait work as well. His sitters are amongst his closest friends, family members, former girlfriends and lovers, possibly a woman with whom he is presently romantically involved, and perhaps most poignantly his ex wife Ann-sofie, to whom he was married for fours years. Once again, a melding of physicality, sexual or merely corporeal, and tenderly disclosed inner beauty balance these evocative paintings of people. Gold seems to tell us that beauty is not transitory and ephemeral, but that it survives the total range of human experience and emotion.

Jeffrey Gold is represented by Forum Gallery, one of the leading representational galleries in the country with locations in New York City and Los Angeles. Working with Forum, examples of Gold's work are presently in many private as well as public collections throughout the United States and Europe. His painting Still Life with Lemons is included in the monumental exhibition Representing LA, which originated in December of 2000 at the Fry Art Museum in Seattle and is presently on view at the Laguna Museum of Art.

Niccolo Brooker