In Love

Jan’s Colorfields are richly-saturated abstract-expressions that characterize his emotional response to events going on around him in the contemporary world, and works in his Totems series present icons, objects, and scenes as metaphors for reflection on current events and themes relevant to contemporary living.

With In Love, Jan is responding to the visual vocabulary of mid-twentieth-century American abstract-expressionist painter Barnett Newman, whose vertical lines or ‘zips’ were meant to represent eternity and unchanging truths in large-scale compositions, and combining his own life experience of being born in the United States in the Summer of 1967, the so-called Summer Of Love.

“For me, these colors represent the feeling of being in love, and of living in ‘love’ as a philosophical choice. The golden stripes draw the eye upwards toward the heavens and are meant to refer to ‘hearts of gold,’ while the rich crimson field is meant to represent the heart, and the rich, rewarding warmth of living one’s life in love.”