Vertical Suede

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

With Vertical Suede, Jan is responding to the visual vocabulary of mid-twentieth-century American intellectual and abstract-expressionist painter Barnett Newman, whose vertical lines or ‘zips’ were meant to represent eternal truths in the context of large-scale compositions.

“For me, this is a totem to the virtue of blue-sky optimism – and in this case ‘night-sky’ optimism – of new projects, and of new life, shining brightly and clearly through the void.

“The new-leaf green of the vertical lines for me represents new life, or new work, and the deep blue is a vast open space, akin to ‘the deep blue sea.’ Bright, bold, and powerful, the lines of new life move through the darkness like shafts of light, crisply and clearly dividing up the darkness around it.”