Jason Willome
“Bewilderment increases in the presence of the mirrors.”
— Tarjei Vesaas, The Boat in the Evening
Jason Willome works across a range of mediums, investigating the tension between the mental and the physical. At the heart of Willome’s practice is painting – a medium that he treats in a uniquely tactile way. His work rubs together competing aspects of pictorial space and surface, or illusion and sculptural form, exploring moments of paradox and metaphor in the picture where image crosses into the space of the viewer. His recent paintings depict disaster and wreckage – flooded or snow-filled landscapes with only traces of human presence – created by pours of house paint, faux painting techniques, and other surface artifacts that attenuate the representational space and frame it as fantasy – a reflection of the willful ignorance and softened reality of the current moment.
“One of things I love about painting is what we ignore about painting. It is a constant negotiation of willful ignorance – we pretend we see space and volume on the flat surface of an actual volume; we ignore the format if it is the rectangle that we are accustomed to; we look past the material marks left by a brush – along with almost every other bit of facture that has been shaped by the surface – to see the visage accumulated there. Painting is a practice in fiction that reflects our truth as a species of near-sighted, self-involved pretenders.
time to save ourselves.”
Jason Willome is an artist and Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He has shown his work in group and solo exhibitions both nationally (Colorado, Hawai’i, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas) and internationally (Columbia, Palestine). His work was recently described by William Sarradet as, “…what has to be my favorite painting of 2021.” He has also been featured in Beautiful Decay, Agave Magazine, and Stacy Dacheux’s blog, Revising Loneliness. Jason lives with his family in San Antonio, TX.
