Lily Pad Gallery West | 7/15-8/21 | Milwaukee, WI

Subtle Surrealism

Jeff Faust: Painting the ordinary into the ethereal

Jeff Faust says, “I’ve always deeply loved the work of master realists in portraying the images we are used to, whether a landscape or still life, but I feel a real need to turn that a little bit and create a visual that doesn’t actually exist—but one that I would like to see.”Releasing the Moon, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 36"

His inspiration comes from a dried, twisted eucalyptus leaf, an interesting twig or the patina on an ancient bowl. He combines the objects with other recurring imagery such as birds and ropes and clouds into what he calls “subtle surrealism”—into large-scale paintings of unreal reality. The excitement of the curves of the eucalyptus leaf he has picked up on one of his daily walks reappears when he faces his blank canvas. The image on the canvas has a life of his own as it and the artist’s active imagination collaborate on the composition. “I wobble a bit in the beginning until I get my sea legs,” he explains, “and often a painting has layers and layers of paint as I edit and reedit. It’s like choreography as I get everything to mesh.”Arrangement for Cello and Birdsong, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 36”

Although one can imagine his studio being filled with fascinating objects, it isn’t. He invents the bowls and orbs and many of the other objects right on the canvas. At the end of a workday, he sits in his studio “with a shot of good scotch, formulating bits of ideas. I don’t draw sketches.”The Theater, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36"He has the freedom of doing just what he wants after years of the hard work of painting and being self-taught. It’s tempting to read into Faust’s paintings and burden them with symbolism and unintended meaning. Every day “little brown birds” often populate the paintings, “innocent witnesses” in the scene that visually temper the hard edges,” he says. He revels in the spirit of discovery as he finds objects on his walks, choreographs a composition, “opening little windows” of observation for viewers of his paintings. They offer a moment of inviting calm in a frenetic world.