Bristling with urban attitude, Robert Jessel’s expressivist paintings deploy flowers, apples, trees, cars, buildings, and gothamites as occasions for bold composition and exuberant colour. In many paintings, Nature stands facing the viewer with her hands on her hips, ready to talk back in assertive language of shapes. Jessel says “Nature is composed of spheres, cones, rectangles, and cooler”, and indeed these shapes constantly test each other’s edges in his designs whether set in city or country.
The artist comments that his paintings wrestle “with the flat and the round, a perpetual tug of war.” In his many still lives, color balances form. His still lives draw attention to form by using simple and familiar elements to highlight changes in scale and implied motion.
Jessel was educated at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he received his BFA, and the New York Studio School, where he studied under painter Leland Bell. Since 1986, Jessel has taught as a professor of fine art at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He has exhibited at a number of prestigious galleries and museums including the National Academy of Art, Prince Street Gallery, 55 Mercer Street Gallery, and Bowery Gallery.