Recent Acquisitions

Robert Jessup, Sleeping

Robert Jessup is an American painter who he painted figuratively for most of his career, particularly large triptychs and from 2011 – the present his work is abstract.  

Robert Jessup was born on July 18, 1952, in Moscow, Idaho, to Clifford and Alvina Jessup and was raised in Seattle, Washington. He received his BFA in painting from the University of Washington in 1975 and his MFA in painting from the University of Iowa in 1979. He has had professorships at Ohio State University, Georgia State University, Cornell University, the Hartford Art School, and the University of North Texas. He is currently the Professor of Drawing and Painting at the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.

Jessup’s figurative period was from 1971 – 2004. During this period, he created stylized and representational work. The paintings tended to be large triptychs fifteen feet wide by six feet in height. His work was heavily textured like a choppy sea when viewed up close with heavily symbolic subject matter.

From 2005 – 2010 his work was transitional. Already an established artist Jessup, then in his mid-fifties, and his wife Faith travelled to Europe for a month in 2008. They travelled to Madrid, Brussels and Florence and he was most influenced by the baroque paintings in the Prado in Spain. He returned “with a desire to be more aggressive, more ambitious, more visionary, and take more chances.” Paintings during this time were strange and sometimes unsettling.

From 2011 – the present Jessup “exchanged ferocious depiction for ferocious plasticity” and started painting completely in the abstract style. He started working “with a 10-inch palette knife, making huge sweeping gestures, pushing the paint this way and that, scraping it off and hurling it back on.”

Selected exhibitions

·       The Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, Texas

·       Besharat Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia

·       Conduit Gallery, Dallas, Texas

·       Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia

·       Schomburg Gallery, Santa Monica, California

·       Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia    

Jessup is married to the painter Faith Scott Jessup, whom he met while both were at Cornell. They raised two children, Molly, and Christopher. He has one sibling, an older brother, Richard Jessup, a retired lawyer.

Collections: His drawings and paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.

 

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