{"id":15541,"date":"2025-03-15T12:15:26","date_gmt":"2025-03-15T19:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paintingperceptions.com\/?p=15541"},"modified":"2025-03-15T12:15:26","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T19:15:26","slug":"jason-harvey-peace-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paintingperceptions.com\/jason-harvey-peace-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"Jason Harvey: Peace Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review by John Goodrich<\/a>, guest contributor<\/h3>\n

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Jason Harvey, Peace Tree<\/em>, 1972 ink on paper 14h x 17w in,
images courtesy of Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects<\/p><\/div>\n

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Artists are seekers. Some search for insights into cultural habits and circumstances; often they end up finding something else \u2014 a deeper sense of their own social role. Other artists concentrate on faithfully drawing and painting the objects around them. They\u2019re liable to eventually arrive at a more elemental and solitary realization: what it means to exist in light and space. Judging from the drawings and paintings in the quietly luminous exhibition \u201cPeace Tree,\u201d Jason Harvey (1919-1982) belongs to this second group of seekers.<\/p>\n

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Harvey came from a family of painters that included his sister Anne and son Steven (curator of \u201cPeace Tree\u201d). Jason\u2019s work has seldom been on view; it was last exhibited in 2002, in the New York Studio School\u2019s show \u201cFamily Line,\u201d which featured the work of all three family members. During a peripatetic childhood, Jason lived in Chicago, New York, Sante Fe and France. Though duly noted by his parents, his artistic gifts were overshadowed by the precociously talented Anne. In his early adulthood Jason worked as an art director at advertising agencies, later turning to furniture design and to fabricating custom lamps. But in his early 40s, he made the leap to fine art, and began drawing the objects and scenes around him. By his next decade, he was painting as well.<\/p>\n

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Jason Harvey, Studio with Wood Stove<\/em>, compressed charcoal on paper 13 1\/2h x 11w in<\/p><\/div>\n

The 14 drawings and four paintings in the exhibition mostly depict the interior of his studio loft on Cooper Square. Small in scale, they feel exceptionally intimate, capturing his surroundings with a spirited but disciplined lyricism. Built up from rapid cross-hatchings of ink or compressed charcoal, their tones create richly atmospheric effects \u2014 not just an all-purpose depth, but particular scenarios of light. Subtle shadings in the pen-and-ink drawing \u201cPeace Tree\u201d adroitly delineate its spaces: a sunlit tree viewed through a doorway, its leaves eloquently summarized; the lightly limned details of wall and door on either side. Hanging next to it, a portrait of a refrigerator, centering a kitchen wall, recalls James Castle in its mute personableness \u2014 though Harvey possesses a considerably more agile touch. In several views of studio corners, the artist\u2019s robust sense of design steers the evocative tones, animating the rise of a wood burning stove\u2019s stack, and the visual stutter of bags, cans, and boxes arrayed about the floor.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the exhibition, in a 1979 self-portrait, the artist eyes himself with soulful intensity. The mysteries of the visual, implicit in all these drawings, turns explicit in \u201cDream,\u201d in which dense ink cross-hatchings hint at figures emerging from the swirl of sky\/trees above a nascent landscape. A night scene of the Manhattan skyline somehow extracts a delicate dusk light from a densely textured charcoal sky.<\/p>\n

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Jason Harvey, Self Portrait<\/em>, 1979 Pencil On Paper 13 3\/4h x 10 3\/4w in<\/p><\/div>\n

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Jason Harvey, Refrigerator<\/em>, nd ink on paper<\/p><\/div>\n

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Among the paintings, an image of a plate of apples on a chair stands out, as does a second roof-top view. Both use the luscious dimensionality of color to conjure the workings of light.<\/p>\n

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Jason Harvey, Night Scape Cooper Square<\/em>, Dec 1962 compressed charcoal on paper 14h x 17w in<\/p><\/div>\n

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Jason Harvey, 5 apples on a blue plate on a red chair<\/em>, Undated Oil On Panel 12h x 14 1\/2w in<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201cThe pictures have told me today that my home is in the making,\u201d reads an entry in the artist\u2019s personal journal. Are some of these very same \u201cpictures\u201d hanging in the exhibition? In any event, one senses throughout these works an elemental, mutual affirmation between artist and subject: a sheltering home, repaying the artist\u2019s devotion to its particularities of light and space.<\/p>\n

Jason Harvey: Peace Tree<\/em> at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects<\/a>, NYC, NY February 8\u2013March 8, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review by John Goodrich, guest contributor     Artists are seekers. Some search for insights into cultural habits and circumstances; often they end up finding something else \u2014 a deeper…<\/p>\n

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