The Bridge #22, Devorah Jacoby

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. Her powerhouse works 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.”  In recent years Jacoby has been fine-tuning her sophisticated means of expression, loosening up her painting style and becoming more and more abstract in her navigation of 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 with the gallery in 2006. 

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.”    

As to how she is feeling these days since COVID -19, she says, “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it all. I am vacillating between panic, sadness, anger and acceptance all cycling thru me every day ... I think many of us feel the same. She offered us this poem.

Today by Mary Oliver

Today I’m flying low and I’m

not saying a word

I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,

the bees in the garden rumbling a little,

the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.

And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I’m traveling

a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple.