{"id":32025,"date":"2016-02-11T01:25:22","date_gmt":"2016-02-11T07:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=32025"},"modified":"2018-10-09T14:32:33","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T20:32:33","slug":"intersections-the-life-and-art-of-jim-jacobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/intersections-the-life-and-art-of-jim-jacobs\/","title":{"rendered":"Intersections: The Life and Art of Jim Jacobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels kind of like I\u2019m just out of graduate school and I can finally work in the studio,\u201d says Ogden artist Jim Jacobs, who is enjoying his first year of retirement after three decades as professor of art at Weber State University. Down a one-way alley off Ogden\u2019s 24th Street, in a salmon-colored building and behind a rust-colored door, Jacobs now spends his days layering photos, acrylics and epoxy for a group of paintings that explore memory (the source material harks back to a year spent in Spain almost a decade ago), or grafting segments of planed wood and found tree limbs for his elegant sculptural works, some of which are on exhibit this month at the Rio Gallery, others of which are slated for a show at Finch Lane in April.<\/p>\n

Jacobs spent his first 18 years in Philadelphia, where he says his relationship to the outdoors was influenced by the job he got at 14 working for his neighbor, a gardener. They landscaped for a wealthy family\u2014the model for Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story<\/em>\u2014 with an estate of 33 acres. \u201cWe would start cutting the lawn on Monday,\u201d he jokes, \u201cand finish by the end of the week. I think that had an impact on me, with my relationships to plants, grass and trees,\u201d he says, referencing the many limbs that dot his studio. It also helped his ability to think. \u201cThe job was just incredibly boring. Your mind could go lots of places.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacobs also liked to surf, even if the Jersey shore he visited offered little in the way of waves \u2014 \u201cYou had to wait for a hurricane.\u201d So when it came time to decide on college, he headed to Jacksonville University in Florida. \u00a0\u201cI probably misspent a lot of my undergraduate time,\u201d he remarks wryly.<\/p>\n

When he wasn\u2019t surfing, an interest in the sciences that began at a young age directed his initial studies. It was only halfway through college that he took a painting class and then \u201cslowly started switching away from chemistry and botany.\u201d He finished with a BFA in 1978, after which he enrolled in an MFA program at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. Again, it wasn\u2019t far from the beach, but he says, \u201cthere I became more serious, and I focused on painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

At East Carolina, abstraction took the place of his previous figurative work and Jacobs became more and more interested in exploring the painting as an object. He began deconstructing the physicality of the painting, creating a variety of shaped canvases that became more and more complicated\u2014one had 23 different elements. These were still very much paintings, with a variety of color and brushstrokes applied to the surfaces, but the canvases themselves, hung on a wall, became meta-brushstrokes, communicating with the wall the way a splash of paint communicates with the canvas. \u201cWhat interested me was the interaction with the environment,\u201d he says. He would leave gaps in his constructed canvases or make works with screen wire, so you\u2019d see through it to the wall behind; and he would investigate the hanging conditions for his paintings, matching the value and tone of the wall so that the painting would blend into the wall on one side, or so that a gap in the structure of the painting revealed the wall but would look like brushstrokes because they matched other portions that were just paint.<\/p>\n

It was with this body of work that he applied for teaching positions, snagging the Weber State job after a couple of years as an adjunct. \u201cI was offered the job here at Weber State, but also had a possibility in Buffalo. They wanted to fly me in. So I had to decide between a sure thing here, or some future possibility at Buffalo . . . Utah was beautiful so I just said sorry [to Buffalo] and decided to take the sure thing.\u201d Plus, Utah had skiing, which Jacobs has found is a pleasurable substitute for surfing (he began as a downhill skier but Mark Biddle has since turned him on to Telemark).<\/p>\n