About Artist
Statement
My paintings are influenced by our ever changing popular culture, personal relationships and extensive travel. I think my work reflects the fullness and intensity of my life through the use of strong colors and composition. I have always admired and studied many of the abstract expressionists of the New York School, especially Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombley and Jackson Pollock. Eventually I discovered and fell in love with the extraordinary work by women artists such as Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler.
My use of gestural abstraction can be evidenced by bold brush strokes, robust mark-making, dripping paint and scraping. These processes create intensity and an array of textures on a single canvas. Combining acrylics, charcoal, spray paint and oil sticks in one work, builds movement, depth, energy and sometimes chaos. For the most part, my pallet is bold, using a wide array of colors. These combinations of colors often produce tension, causing the viewer to stop for a brief time to take a closer look at an area of interest before taking in the painting’s entirety. Sometimes, I use only a limited selection of colors to create a calmer mood. More often than not, there are several iterations hiding under the final coat of paint. It is rare that I begin a work with a definitive idea or direction, but instead just forge ahead, with the results hopefully ending with excitement and a visual challenge for the viewer.
Bio
Jamie Sherman was born in Chicago, Illinois, where she attended school at Francis Parker and New Trier East. While quite young she attended art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and regularly frequented many of Chicago’s finest museums. She and her siblings got creative and had fun on weekends at the improvisational theater Second City. In her senior year of high school, Jamie studied photography under the tutelage of Joyce Neimanas of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Later, Jamie and her family moved east to Sugarbush, Vermont and Newport, Rhode Island where the emphasis was focused more on sports, boating and work. In the spirit of adventure, she later joined her father and family in Europe, traveling for some years by land and sea, never having a dull moment. Eventually Jamie joined the yachting world as a chef, taking her throughout New England, the Caribbean the Pacific. Her last foray in the marine industry came as the owner/operator of Newport Harbor Electronics, serving yachts, commercial vessels and 12 Meter racing boats during the America’s Cup years.
Jamie spent a good deal of time living in South Florida, where she attended art school, studying general and architectural photography, graduating with honors. She was commissioned to shoot large format images in Florida, the Caribbean and the Outer Banks, NC. for destination magazines, private villas and real estate publications. She built and operated two South Florida resort destination websites, as well as a retail lifestyle website. For a wonderful period of time, Jamie and her son Alistair moved back to her hometown in Vermont where they skied, snowboarded and played some golf. Eventually she became a real estate broker, operating her own office serving the Mad River Valley. After years of dealing with the extreme elements, they headed back to the balmy warmth of South Florida.
Having lived through a long pandemic isolation, Jamie decided to switch gears and became a self-taught abstract painter. A culmination of all her adventures, escapades and tribulations, Jamie was able to find a way to share and express her life’s experiences. Jamie has moved to Winter Park in Central Florida with her son and his little clan, where she now paints in her garage studio. As evidenced by you reading this Statement, you can see she has again embarked on a new website where she shares her work in a gallery format.