Oliver Jeffers
Oliver Jeffers grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is a visual artist and author working in painting, bookmaking, illustration, collage, performance and sculpture. Jeffers’s engagements and practice are internationally recognised. His critically acclaimed picture books have been translated into over forty languages and sold over 10 million copies worldwide. His original artwork has been exhibited at such institutions as the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Palais Auersperg in Vienna. Jeffers has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award, Bologna Rigazzi Award, An Irish Book Award, and a United Kingdom Literary Association Award.
I love Jeffers’s website, I think its very creative and playful just like his work. His word mark also looks well on his website and fits in well with his whole playful style.
His illustrations for children's books are all so unique. I love how his style of illustrating and his writing are so distinctive and recognisable.
However, the project that caught my interest the most was his dipped painting project. In November 2014, Jeffers did a series of performances whereby he dipped a fully painted portrait into a container full of paint to fully hide the bottom section of the portrait. The people present at the time of the performance are the only people to have seen the competed portrait before he submerged them in paint. I found this very intriguing as to why he would potentially ruin his beautifully painted portraits but he claims that at the time ‘a portrait was arbitrary’ whereas the dipped portraits were more interesting and ‘almost seemed like the person was peering over something’. For his performances he carefully selects an interesting group of people. The sitters he chooses he interviews them first and writes a summary of the interview and about who the sitter is on a sheet of paper and sets it on the ground. As he emerges the painting out of the paint, the piece of paper on the ground catches the splashes of paint from above.
He describes the performance as being about life and death and takes away peoples phones to enhance their experience. The viewers can remember the experience however they like just not through a photo or a video.
