DEVORAH JACOBY: PAINTINGS

Painter Devorah Jacoby has always presented a complex internal world in her works. Coming to her career in art after a practice in psychotherapy, she is familiar with the intricacies of the mind and the dances we perform in response to our emotions and surroundings. In her latest body of work Inside Out, currently on view at Seager Gray Gallery, this world is inhabited primarily by women—women often lost in thought, submerged in a landscape that at times obscures or threatens to engulf them.

Jacoby’s surfaces are juicy, her command of oil paint is deft and joyous—here expressing a surprising and at times flamboyant melding of styles from pointillism to realism to splatters, knife painting, and even occasionally including some glitter. Outside (2022) features a woman in a full, swirling green skirt. Eyes closed, she is in and of nature. The upper half of the canvas is scraped and scumbled, scratched and marked with orange drips and a periwinkle blue outline, like a butterfly. Here, as elsewhere, a pattern of rectangular blocks of color suggests a broad pointillist stroke as well as a bit of the geometrical abstract passages in Gustave Klimt.

With the subtext of the pandemic shutdown and how all our lives were upended as a kind of undergirding principle, Jacoby’s tense, often dysfunctional or emotionally-fraught human dynamics have let up a bit in most of these works, as if finding relief from the challenges of daily life in painting the beauty of nature tipped the scales away from too much psychological tension. The artist spent time in Wyoming during shelter-in-place, and found abundant inspiration in the landscape. Jacoby uses gardens, plants, and in particular flowers to repeatedly draw the eye, and cause it to linger, in moments of pure pleasure.

Appearing in two versions, I Can Feel Your Heart Beating (2022) evokes some of the darker regions of Jacoby’s world, as an introspective young girl holds a disembodied heart in front of her white jumper. The words evoke a sweet moment of lovers, perhaps, in close embrace, while the more clinical vision presented suggests an opposite reading, something rent asunder, death, disease, or perhaps love gone bad. We may also recall the iconic works of Frida Kahlo, where externalized organs symbolize the physical and emotion pain which that artist endured.

Reading (2022) is an excuse for more juicy brushwork, an explosion of pattern including folds of creamy tones marked with yellow and orange splotches, a profusion of wild daisies forming a dense blanket in the foreground. Two parted feet and ankles draw the viewer inward, to an ambiguously rendered interior space. A blurry red form, the book, dissolves into a blotchy sky of blue and pink. The absence of a head or upper body offers a bit of a shock, and can be read a humorous, or disquieting, or both.

Fruits de Terre (2022) is the star of the exhibition. A red room houses woman clutching a Toy Poodle, the scene conveying a European Modernist vibe echoing Matisse and Manet. A red vase, patterned with the recurring rectangular color blocks, holds assorted flowers in warm hues, an array of food, salads, strawberry shortcake, even crustaceans, creating a tour de force of color and texture. Adding to the visual texture are charcoal lines delineating a cake and various cooking implements.

Lilypad (2022), a mid-sized vertical work, is mysterious, dark in hue and subject matter. A female form is splayed out across a horse. A bright red pattern wraps her body, reading alternately as fabric marked by pattern, or more disturbingly, as blood. Rough green circles, the pads of the title, fill the lower portion of the canvas. The woman’s leg and foot hang limply along those of the horse, one may well wonder exactly what kind of nocturnal ride has just transpired.

In Flowers All Year (2016-2022) it is interesting to explore how the bouquet dissolves into geometry and gesture simultaneously, as does a woman’s face on its right, her right eye obscured by a giant orange rose. This bounty of flowers, a recurring device in the show, thus becomes a bit menacing, is this a surfeit of pleasure?

Horizon (2022) forces the issue of the figure’s immersion in the paint, bringing the rectangular marks front and center, a small nude seen from the rear appears as if in an attempt to pry them apart and enter the space. Starfish (2022), a dreamy exploration of every shade of blue, features a tiny form of the sea creature alongside a girl in a red bathing suit, a foil to all the cool hues. This work is one of the most successful in allowing the viewer to become vicariously immersed in the beauty and tranquility of nature.

Jacoby is a gifted painter, her skillful mix of generous swaths of seductive color and creamy paint entice the viewer into a space where the mental world intersects with the visual, introspection meshed with observation. Yet here, in this body of work, the figures appear strikingly and unmistakably alone, the only narrative one we may construct as to how and why they are isolated. Certainly an apt device for a dark time of social distancing, yet Jacoby’s disarming use of the power of nature to soothe and delight us ultimately puts a surprisingly positive spin on a time that has been anything but.

Barbara Morris
Articultures
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Inside Out explores Jacoby’s lush and deeply satisfying paintings, which are a deliberate respite from the chaos and challenges of the last several years – incorporating just enough edge to evoke emotional and psychological states. These are paintings of women in private moments, whether they are working through things, as in Lost in Thought, letting their mind relax as in Dream or simply relishing the sensual experience of being in the elements as in Picnic or Beach Blanket. It is essential in all of them that we are not actually there as viewers. It is a glimpse into a private and intimate world.

During the pandemic, Jacoby had the opportunity to spend time in Wyoming, where she was taken by the bright colors of the landscape and the vast expanses of sky. “Nature has played a huge role for me in the last few years,” she says. “In times of chaos, it is nature that tethers, grounds and heals.”

Thirty of the thirty-three paintings in the exhibition have her subjects set in nature. They appear to find freedom and sensuality outdoors as in her work Half of Me is Ocean, Half of Me is Sky, an intensely physical painting in which her subject almost dissolves into her commingling with the elements. Jacoby’s landscapes pulsate with energy. In works like Horizon and In the Wild, the figures are small and appear to have merged with their surroundings as part of a vast natural world.

Jacoby’s exhibitions always feature a large magnum opus of a dining table and this show is no exception. In earlier works, the complexities of family dynamics might come into play, but in her large work, Fruits de Terre, the artist uses bright color and dynamic brushstrokes to set a table of abundance – shrimp cocktail, lobster, bright salads and a lush strawberry shortcake. The female figure stands looking over her elaborate feast, holding her dog beside an outsized vase of fantastical flowers. She is a magician with a butterfly in her hair conjuring up a happy place where we can once again gather together and enjoy the fruits of the earth in the pleasure of each other’s company.

Jacoby enjoys working in themes, relishing particular colors or scenes, as in Keep Checkin the Horizon I and II and the grass-green skirts of Harvest and I Love My Time Here where the color merges with the verdant surroundings.

Two other such intriguing works are entitled I Can Feel Your Heart Beating I and II. In each of these, the figure is standing in a field. She is cropped to fill the space and looks directly forward, holding a large human heart. In one, the figure is also holding a painter’s palette. The interpretation is left to the viewer, but one can imagine that there are two environments in which the artist can speak to the collective heartbeat of the world – in nature and in her studio.

It is in that studio where Jacoby is able explore with absolute freedom. It is there that she has fine-tuned her sophisticated painting style – a fearless exploration of how gesture, color and composition can capture the complexities of being human. In speaking about her process, she stresses the importance of letting go of any expectations or agenda. With her conscious mind out of the way the subconscious resolves itself in a compelling liquid beauty. You want to immerse yourself in these paintings, not only because of the subject matter, but in the luscious, visceral exuberance of the paint.

Enjoy Mill Valley
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Devorah Jacoby has an uncanny ability to conjure up pure emotional and psychological states in her paintings with a masterful use of paint stroke, color and composition. In “She,” her first exhibition in three years, she has put together powerhouse works that entice, challenge, delight and engage.

“My paintings are about life’s complexity,” says the artist. “Life is incredibly beautiful, lush, joyous, heartbreaking, messy and enraging. When I am painting, I express all of that; it’s a release, it’s freeing.” The last three years for Jacoby have been an incubation period in which she has further fine-tuned her sophisticated means of expression, loosening up her painting style, becoming more and more abstract and navigating human experience. Always provocative, her paintings are both dark and light with a fearlessness that has attracted us to her work since her first exhibition in 2006.

Encapsulating all of that is the painting ‘Cascade’. It is large, 60 x 72” and is of a deep woods, dark, foreboding, welcoming and beautiful all at the same time. It is only when you look closer that you see against the black vertical of an abstracted tree, a couple, very small in scale. They are articulated so clearly but with a bare minimum of information. The boundaries are blurred. The couple are a part of each other and a part of everything around them. They are in it together.

In the painting, ‘Fire,’ inspired by the California wildfires, a woman looks out on her burning home. She has lost everything. The expression on her face says it all. “This is a rare figurative work,” says artist and teacher Chester Arnold, “It seethes with feeling and represents an emotional fusion of the subject and its painter.”

Jacoby skews perspective and purposefully aims at the unexpected. In the painting Butterfly, a female figure stands in a field her arms full of luscious fruit, apples bananas and oranges. Her right arm has virtually disappeared and an apple is suspended in space on her left side and there is one on her head. She is a modern Mother Nature embracing but not able to hold on to all of life’s plenty.

In Dandelion, patches of color and loose brushstrokes define the face and hair of her subject but the eyes are carefully articulated, capturing someone in deep reflection, perhaps about impermanence and regrowth as symbolized by the dandelion pappus.

There is a physicality in many of Jacoby’s paintings, as in ‘Daydream’ where the female figure has nearly dissolved into her surroundings merging with the ground and the sky around it and in the quirky and charming Green Couch an expression of the joy of being a small being on a big and inviting sofa all dressed up.

Asked for her inspirations, Jacoby refers to Lucian Freud, Marlene Dumas, Jenny Seville and the Bay Area Figurative school. She is excited about the power of abstraction, pure color and brushstroke to magnify and define the emotional content of a work. She refers to a quote by Hans Hoffman, “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

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Complex psychological dramas play out like moody, amorphous dreams in Devorah Jacoby’s Mysterious Barricades. Seduced by the surfaces of her canvases, we may abruptly be startled to confront an array of arresting images which expose raw nerves. Jacoby’s gift for exploring deep emotional content relates to experience doing art therapy with children. “I was always so interested in the internal story they were telling,” the artist stated, “children, and many adults as well, have difficulty verbally communicating thoughts and feelings, but can communicate so much through their artwork.”

Jacoby, a long-time Bay Area resident whose early years were spent in Chicago, had studied law for two years at USF before shifting to psychotherapy—obtaining degrees including a certificate in Art Therapy from UC Berkeley. Being so closely involved with the power of images encountered as a therapist whetted the artist’s desire to embark on her own studio practice. Her choice was affirmed by the tremendous response the work received—her ability to convey feelings and suggest the complex dynamics of human interaction resonates with a power born of experience and knowledge.

Inspired by American Realist painter Robert Henri’s Portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1916), Motherhood (2013) presents a sensual woman in repose on a vermilion couch, her naked child gazing back at the viewer, conflating the odalisque with the Madonna. The rich red of the upholstery could allude to blood—the fluid which defines women’s passages throughout maturity and as well accompanying the act of birth. With a red-on-white diamond pattern echoing the diamond shapes of the couch, the figure’s dress parts on one side, discreetly revealing the form of a full breast. The lovely face of this woman, as is the case in numerous of Jacoby’s works, reveals several contradictory states, and in fact separate faces join on the neck as one. She is serene in one version, attentive to child in another, ravenously devouring a slice of melon in a third. Jacoby comments on “the conflict, needing to be fully present and connecting with our kids while also taking care of ourselves.”

A number of the works, Ice Skating (2010-13), Yellow Chair (2013), Veil (2013), and Girl with Chandelier (2013), for example, present solitary figures, their environments loosely sketched and hazy, caught as though in a contemplative moment. Leavings (2012-12) offers two figures, yet suggests one; frontal and back views of a young woman, caught in transition, in a creamy background littered with flora and fauna. A pair of kittens on her shirt seem to be in motion as well, as a hand emerges from the edge of the garment to cradle one.

Woman as a sensual, indeed sexual, being, is another recurring theme in the artist’s work. Hide and Seek (2010-13) presents a provocative image of a winged female figure, spreadeagled and blindfolded, perched in an ambiguous way atop another figure, one only visible as a pair of legs. Both sets of legs culminate in high heel shoes, suggesting a twinning of the figures. White gloves cover hands which nestle adjacent to a piece of drapery that obscures intimate detail. A partially sublimated sexual tension also informs the dynamic A Girl and Her Dog (2012-13), where the pair engage in a physical game on a checkered spread, the “girl” caught while attempting to pry a red ball from the canine’s teeth.

Zebra (2011-13) incorporates the head and neck of the creature “representing clarity in black and white terms…they’re beautiful, strong animals, and the spiritual symbolism of the stripes has to do with the integration of opposites.” A grid of gray and pink creates order—a surprising variation is one square slathered in silver glitter. Repeatedly throughout Jacoby’s oeuvre, women present conflicting images of poise and anxiety, of a restraint quickly countered by abandon. We meet women actively revealing aspects of themselves—rather than as a passive objects of the viewer’s gaze.

A relatively rare glimpse into the psyche of men appears in Against the Wall (2013), linking to the artist’s darker side, the armless male figure is presented upside-down, the top of a head and chest face us, while bent legs are turned at a right angle. Says Jacoby “he is naked on the floor…exposed and unguarded. Twisting and at points turning away from looking at the barren, vulnerable, and often perplexing inner-expedition of his life…”

Jacoby has found inspiration in a wide range of sources, from Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1852), which informs the work Drifting (2012), to the Bay Area Figurative School, where she senses a close alliance to artists such as Joan Brown and Nathan Oliveira. Nest (2012-13) clearly reveals influence from German Expressionist painters, particularly the Verists group found in Weimar Germany. “I was in New York, on the bus, and saw this ad, and there was this little tiny show at the Met called ‘Glitter and Doom,’ one of those shows that makes you fall to your knees.” Devorah cites her debt as well to South African-born artist Marlene Dumas, who makes her home in the Netherlands, as inspiration for the courage to push boundaries.

Daring in imagery and subject matter, one may note a marked restraint in Jacoby’s palette. She gravitates toward monochromatic black and white and greyscale as a unifying feature, often combined with delicate pinks countered by intensely saturated reds. This measured, tasteful use of color may act as a foil for the more highly-charged emotional content—making it a deceptively smooth passage into the churning emotional currents within the work.

Barbara Morris