Biography
Jason Van Pelt is a contemporary artist living in New Orleans, LA, creating illustrative, representational works depicting the people and places that resonate from his surroundings. Jason gravitated toward art early on, attending New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts in high school. He studied Fine Art at LSU before pursuing a career in digital design and web development, which he continues today. This relationship between traditional and digital media permeates his work. His process incorporates photography that is digitally illustrated, where he experiments with interpretation, shapes, mark making and limited color palettes, before finishing as acrylic paintings on canvas.
Drawing and painting have always played an integral role in Jason’s life, as a way to explore ideas and philosophies expressed through color, line and shape. Though he grew up surrounded by images by Impressionist and Surrealist masters, Jason found he related to Pop Art’s exploration of beauty and purpose in everyday objects, product design and pop culture. While he spent many years learning and practicing portraiture, it wasn’t until he began experimenting with minimalism — and Adobe Illustrator — that he found an approach that had the impact he envisioned.
Initially Jason struggled with the idea of creating digital art, finally concluding that there needed to be a point at which the digital process became analog, crossing over to hand made. Jason believed the imperfection of lines painted by hand and colors mixed by eye helped to ground his work, developing a process in which his digital sketches are one step toward a final work executed as acrylic on canvas.
Jason’s subject matter tends to be personal, while striving to tell universal stories. He aspires to find subtleties in his surroundings, accentuating his subjects and removing distractions, focusing only on what is necessary to tell his story. His life in New Orleans resonates in his artwork through references to sublime moments captured during neighborhood walks, observations from his garden, distinctive local architectural details, and figures of personal or cultural significance. Jason’s work seeks to find a common ground with the viewer through authentic experience and a shared nostalgia.
Artist Statement
The goal of my work is to capture authentic experiences that reject the struggle of the mundane and the insincerity of consumerism and faux luxury. I do so by creating art that depicts sublime moments, objects & scenes of beauty, and portraits of notable people of social impact, with the hope of connecting with others in a shared nostalgia.
I’m inspired by the simplicity of iconography and its ability to reduce an idea or subject to its essence, focusing on a primary characteristic or inherent truth. I choose limited palettes to emphasize specific color relationships and accentuate the shapes and lines of my compositions.
My hybrid digital / traditional process is heavily influenced by my years spent in a career on the cusp of creativity and technology. The result is a flat, illustrative approach that favors a lack of brushstrokes, mimicking the perfection possible with a machine or printed process, while allowing the imperfection inherent in the human hand to remain present and unmistakable.
The works in my submission reflect walks around my extended neighborhood, which share a beginning and end, but meander untethered at all points between. I am fortunate to live in an area that is full of both natural and built beauty, and each painting in this collection captures such a moment when I was struck by a scene worth capturing. They are less about “being nowhere” and, perhaps, more about having nowhere to be.
