Branding and Design

Jean-Pierre Roy

June 3rd, 2009

Painter Jean-Pierre Roy combines technical talent with a remarkably unique artistic vision to show me wonders I hadn’t imagined seeing until I recently discovered his work.

Who are you?

My name is Jean-Pierre Roy.  I’m a 34 year old painter living and working in New York City.  I was born in Santa Monica, California and worked in the film industry as an artist from a young age.  After studying film and painting in undergrad, I did a stint at DreamWorks and EALA before getting into Matte painting.  From there, I wanted to recontextualize my images for a gallery environment and decided to move to New York to attend Graduate School at The New York Academy of Art.  Since then, I’ve been exhibiting within the US and abroad and have my first solo museum show in the fall at the Torrence Art Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

Why do you create?

That’s both a tough question and an easy one.  I think that ultimately, I don’t really have a choice.  There is a neurological component to this practice… a compulsion to make things… an OCD to create a visual document of indescribable ideas.  For me, making images is the only form of meditation that satisfies both the emotional and intellectual spectrum of my life.  It’s a sandbox of my own design that allows me to meld my love of imagination, analysis, intellect and raw emotion.

The End of the Old Model (440)

There is a vibrant and violent contrast between the natural and the manufactured in your art. Why does this inspire you?

One of the fundamental motives behind my process is the act of reproducing the physical systems of the world from imagination. Smoke, metal, rocks, plants… even lens flares are all quantifiable. They are natural systems of matter that receive light… and it is the analytical application of invented light that forms an underlying meditation, if you will, that compliments the larger, thematic narratives of my paintings — change, time, decay, rebirth. This contrast between structures speaks to a larger struggle for control between the systems of man and the systems of nature. It is the moment where they overlap, where the two are neither wholly themselves, or neither wholly each other that serves up a wonderful moment of discovery for me.

The End of the Old Model (660)

You intellectualize your art. How does your left brain effect your creativity?

I do feel that if I wasn’t an artist, I would really be somehow involved in the sciences. The act of discovery is an important part of my process and of what I want to deliver to the viewer. I recently watched a home movie of a birthday party for my sister — in it I was about 9 years old. A friend of my mother’s asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said, “I’m not sure, maybe a scientist, maybe an artist, but whatever it is, I just want to know [how] everything in the universe works.”

It’s a bit of a huge statement, but I do feel that so much of the process of my work does come from this analytical desire to want to understand the fundamental interactions of the physical forces of the world. Representational image making begins with an act of thinking… an act of analysis not just of the subject, but the surface. Da Vinci said that painting wasn’t just a repository of knowledge, but a source of it. We sometimes forget that even with the most expressive of painters, the act of abstraction was an intellectual decision as much as emotional one…

Geometry for the Post-Divine

My grandfather once said, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” That popped into my head today while I was doing something, as it oftentimes does. What advice has stuck with you?

Your grandfather gave you a sound piece of advice… I feel very close to those sentiments myself! You know, the studio can be a lonely place. It can be a monastic, hermetic existence full of self-doubt and anxiety. One thing that my father always told me growing up was, “He who goes alone, goes the farthest.” It has a certain taste of the Golden Age of Exploration to it… very Ernest Shackleton. Somehow, on the darkest night of [the] soul, this one has stuck with me and given me that extra amount of strength. A knowledge that if I just sail a little farther, I’ll find a safe harbor for the night.

My thanks to Jean-Pierre for sharing his work. Please visit Jean-PierreRoy.com for more.