Stain the surface, then wipe away. Apply broad, gritty marks. Paint. Repeat. Create. Destroy. Experiment. Learn. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and hit it. If you miss, start another painting.
Almost fifteen years of study are condensed in each, intimate, two-minute mark. Jeremy Mann doesn't have a formal approach to painting. He paints with confidence and flair. He works with rubber brayers, large custom made scrapers, and pretty much anything he can get his hands on. A painting that he used to take 12 hours to make, he could now complete in 50 minutes.
Jeremy's work is a visual expression of who he is and what he thinks about the world around him. Through the process of mark-making, he reveals his moods and emotions by using colors in a way that they are both vivid and atmospheric. Each painting demonstrates his unique style. His techniques are constantly evolving through experimentation and customization of tools, surfaces, approaches, and ideas.
Living in the Bay Area, Jeremy often paints the cityscapes he meanders through, inspired by the city's pavement, the grit and loneliness of a bustling hive of life, where reflected street lamps, black swaths of vehicles, dark masses of people and neon signs hover and dance in the rain. He masterfully imbues the city with drama, mood, and personality.
Halfway through the painting process, he stops using any sort of cityscape reference and begins flipping streets around, jumbling up cars and people, and cutting buildings in half in a desperate search for beauty in a world made up of walls and windows.
Jeremy also enjoys painting indoor portraits of lone, young women, whom he finds as striking and restless as the cities he depicts, as well as landscapes and plein airs of peaceful moments of recharge and travel. He fills sketchbook after sketchbook with observations and ideas, thoughts, vague recollections of dreams and random ramblings.
Jeremy Mann's interest in fine arts probably began somewhere between collecting roadkill for their skulls and wanting to draw better than his sister. He graduated from Ohio University with a Cum Laude degree in Fine Art-Painting and earned his Master’s Degree with Valedictorian honors at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Since then, he has garnered substantial attention in the art world. A recently filmed documentary on his life has gained several prestigious awards, and a massive first volume of paintings, published in 2015, is consistently sought after and very well received. Praised by critics and collectors alike, Jeremy's paintings have graced the cover of several American Art Collector magazine issues as well as countless other publications worldwide.
To him, a painting is finished only when everything lines up perfectly and there’s nothing in it that frustrates him. Or, at times, when he's “just tired of kicking around a dead horse and needs to trash it and move on to the next piece”.
