I had Jay for freshman art appreciation way back in the day. I consider him something of a mentor, though I’ve been in the Pacific Northwest now for so long, and have been out of touch with most of my SoCal brethren that I don’t know that he’d even remember me—though I’d like to think he would. Jay is one of the most unpretentious people I’ve ever met, and has a quiet power that comes from having more talent and more life in his little finger than most people do in their entire bodies; a Kung Fu master/shaolin priest of the art world.
Jay does solar burn paintings. He’s got a studio in his house in San Pedro, and a rooftop work area where he burns tiny holes in his work with a magnifying glass. It sounds kind of pedestrian, but the combination of the organic nature of the burns, the highly structured grid pattern they’re burned on, and the color fields that are the base layer of the work give an elegant complexity to the aesthetic that never fails to captivate.
Neither these images, this narrative, nor his own C.V. can do justice to his body of work. If you get the opportunity to see it in person, you should.