biography
Tim Jag is drawn to bare-boned hard-edges and pure abstraction. His OPTICAL DRAWING SERIES stems from a deep interest in the early work of artist Frank Stella, in particular, the Black Painting Series. Jag’s repetition of stripes builds as a whole to create object like images void of cultural references other than the formal qualities of line, shape and color; parring down the pictorial to its primal essence.
Overtime, while working on the series, the artist began to understand how his work relates to primitive forms of mapping, raw forms of architectural rendering, and a strong alignment to ancient and medieval decorative line arts. Jag’s drawings are successfully primitive, relating to the viewers’ eye exactly as they are… a pure form of flat gridded lines, with a fun nod to optical illusions.
Jag’s STARNOVA SERIES began while he was watching an old episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. There is an image in the beginning and end credits where the Starship Enterprise goes into hyperspace and the TV screen shows a quick blur of stars from a center point. Intrigued by the image that was fixed in a flash of time, so began STARNOVA SERIES, which uses this image over and over again, bursting with color, symbology, and metaphor.
additional notes
The artist studied at Sonoma State University, (BFA, 1989) with an undertaking of graduate studies at Montana State University (MFA, 1991). Jag’s work has been exhibited extensively times nationwide and selected for numerous private collections. The artist currently has a laser-like mural installation at Meow Wolf Art Complex, entitled, Starnova #4.
CURRENT ARTICLES
Tim Jag Wins the Acclaimed Artist Purchase Prize 2019
