Acorn
Adelle
Grimm66
JACALlr
Prole
While a resident artist at a college in 2005, Jeff discovered car parts that are mass produced in an incredible variety with built-in complexity. While still working with car parts, these past 18 months have led him in directions he had never considered. Prior to March of 2020, the artist used metal almost exclusively with occasional intrusions of his car part printed fabric. But during the pandemic, with only online options available to show his work, the artist began the exploration of assembling “constructions” (using his sculpture, his paintings and his masks) which he then photographed. The evolution of this direction has been rapid and left a lot of half-finished work in its wake. Jeff has discovered that altering images digitally compliments his response-based creative process which has no preconceived story or image in mind. Through a kind of dance with car parts (and a few other inputs) he follows the ghost of a direction and focuses it to bring, in the case of a mask, the character into being. Similar processes are used in the artist's paintings and in the digital additions. Though it is difficult to see at times, his work is almost exclusively based on car parts and car infrastructure. Jeff believes there are too many cars in the world and the damage done is far more than just environmental. In many of these images, you can see built (bricks), natural (gravel), painted or sculpted backgrounds. Currently, Jeff is building screens and individual objects to add to the constructions. While photographing mask/skeletons on 100 year old sycamores, he became intrigued with the “skin” of these trees. Since then, he has been shooting more “landscapes” and manipulating them with the computer.