Jason’s Journey

March 16, 2007 (RALEIGH, NC) – by Doug Stuber @ 12:06 pm. Filed under www.artsramble.com/wordpress

It's great to know other artists. It's better to know other artists whose work keeps improving. It's right at glorious to know someone who moves up the gallery chain just as their work takes a new direction.
The precarious road to a career as an artist is full of potholes, bankruptcy, strained relationships and sometimes worse ends. So, when an artist battles his way up to the top of the local market, then spreads to the better galleries in Charlotte, and then Atlanta, it's news.
Jason Craighead moved to Raleigh at a time when some wild art was going on. Trace Gallery was hopping, he lived with Mr. Green and Ms. Vizcarra on Bloodworth, and that's hopping all in one house, and he continually ventured out to lend a hand at the Contemporary Art Museum, the Visual Art Exchange, and all manner of institutions that help emerging artists (few do).
Craighead, as a purveyor of the abstract, could have stayed in Florida and done very well. Instead he picked a tough market for abstracts, and still flourished.

His brightly colored beginnings have changed into tones muted down, or flat-out edited by white. What used to be in-your-face blasts of color and lines first took a turn a few years back when he narrowed his palate to white, browns, gray and black. Expressionism got the upper hand then, which made me happy, but may not have enthused his already large following.

So, in a turn back and forward at the same time, Jason leaped back into the full color spectrum, and forward by calming his originals with house-paint-brush wide edits, and meticulous drips over the top of the loud colors. To this layer he adds thin oil-stick applied crayon lines, almost always in black. These act as eye-catchers in ways loud colors can not. They invite you into the painting rather than shouting at you from across the room. His oil stick moments used to separate colors like a coloring book version of abstracts-as-landscapes. Now the oil sticks dance, pas de deux, adding lightness in ways you wouldn't expect black to be able to do.

By the time this new phase hit, he had moved up to a hillside apartment on Morgan, which gave him a great view of at least three building projects going on in downtown Raleigh. His signature "railroad tracks" became crane arms, as his subject matter, even if not apparent to the casual viewer, the erector set backdrop cranked Craighead into finished works that are more accessible without being strictly commercial.
"A contrast in space is found in crane parts, valves, beams and other apparatus being used in the construction downtown," Craighead said as we looked around his studio/apartment. "When a painting goes to a point of chaos I don't like, I start editing with white, and adding a touch more after that. It seems like the entire summer was spent experimenting."

Working as a partner at Glance Gallery took a lot of time away from Jason's painting. In one of those times that only a script-writer could have imagined, just as Craighead took the huge financial risk of leaving Bob Doster at Glance, his work became more noticed, and he's been able to focus.

"Once free of the partnership at Glance, I went in more than one direction at once," Craighead said. "but the work in the Somerhill exhibit is what I want to run with hard and long before I flip to something else." Craighead and Doster remain friends.
Except for some very wild orange small works, Jason's show at Somerhill Gallery (a true step into the major leagues) is all on this new track.
On top of Somerhill, Craighead has added Center of the Earth Gallery in Charlotte and Anne Irwin Gallery in Atlanta, which should keep him busy, and able to anticipate further jumps upward in the future.

By chance I got to see a soft-blue black-lined painting Craighead has up at Center of the Earth, and it's my favorite of the new work. It has no white editing, which means his initial feelings are presented. Not loud, not quiet either, just a professional take on abstraction, but with enough emotions to keep eyes flowing.

Craighead is able to make great works without the obsessive use of white. The new ones are good, but the best are yet to come: a time when his initial thoughts and feelings for the day don't need editing, and are gentle enough to be acceptable commercially, without dampening the spirit within.

There is a square piece called " Untitled (Blue-Jan.) on the right, at the end of the hall that leads into the main gallery at Somerhill. This one uses white, light blue and black too, but the white is used as negative space in ways that the white in "Black Crane Segment" is not. With colors still trying to be free from below, the overlay does not create the dramatic positive-negative space juxtaposition as well as "Untitled (Blue-Jan.)." At least we can see part of the black crane, but with 70% or so of the painting covered in white, isn't there this crushing need to see the rest of the colors and design originally mapped out?

Craighead's show only runs through March 23, so hurry. Sommerhill is at 3 Eastgate, East Franklin St. Chapel Hill. Mon.-Sat. 10:00-5:30. Phone 919.968.8868 or www.somerhill.com.

Media contact: Kim Weiss, blueplate pr: 919-272-8615; kjw27612@yahoo.com

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