Maxon, 2008, Oil and epoxy on canvas 8"x10", private collection
My work has always been focused on the fantastical, expressed through a prism of painterly expressionism. To create the world anew, to shake viewers from complacency, using materiality and novelty. This pursuit has taken the guise of paintings, drawings, graphic novels, animations, and assemblages. What has for many years been portraiture and figurative allegorical works have become phantasmagorias of plastic form itself. I'm atomizing, isolating the building blocks of imagination. High-key colors dance in arabesques, each stroke a vector of sacred geometry. These are paradoxes: abstract yet figurative, Hypercubes, Tesseracts, Platonic monsters emerging from flatness and blooming into three-dimensional mindscapes with the human eye. These aren't abstractions; they're hyper-dimensional visual experiences.
I was a dyslexic savant miscreant, at 13, I was given an IQ and vocational aptitude test that said, "Painter, Cartoonist, Experimental/Assemblage, Gallery Artist" was the occupation I was best suited for. So began serious Art Education, the school library led to a large glossy color reproduction of Gottlieb's "Frozen Sounds 1." Black and red UFOs, a sideways face of God, above a frozen ochre world, In a zero snow filled sky. Was this the future, the past? I devoured Abstract Expressionism, from Pollock's drips to Rothko's call for Tragedy, Ecstasy, and Doom, the New York School - art that is big, bold, and primal. Art Education and Scholarships allowed my intellect to bloom, and allowed me to escape to the happenstance of birth and social class. Painting has given me everything I hold dear in my life, every place I have ever been, every friend. Painting saved my life.
I have been working in Brooklyn, New York City, since 2000, I have always lived and worked in an Art studio or turned wherever I found myself into a studio, I am always working, everyday doing something for Art. My process is ritualistic, surrendering to Arts demands, bringing to fruition what my imagination conjures, by hook or by crook. Always with a canvas going. The whole while, the material world of survival day jobs, teaching, multimedia collaborating, and pushing my art through fire - literally, twice I've faced studio fire, five years apart. And no matter what else, I have continued to do that. Art is Work is Life. Time is the Fire we burn in.
It was 2009, long hours at the drawing table, triggered a sciatica attack, crippling pain caused my pineal gland to activate, unleashing kaleidoscopic metaphysical visions alongside agony. Bedridden, each pain spike triggered an ecstatic panorama of worlds unseen. These experiences and my recovery caused an epigenetic change in my personhood and art practice. My art was no longer attempting to depict the imagination. I wrote a book about it,
The White Feathered Octopus.
Things became real.
I am a painter within the Western Esoteric Tradition of Sacred Geometry. My paintings are vessels, catalysts for a direct experience of the divine sought by a Mystic. Each canvas is a singular act of devotion created within the beholder’s eye .
Iason Ragnar Bellerophon
I was a dyslexic savant miscreant, at 13, I was given an IQ and vocational aptitude test that said, "Painter, Cartoonist, Experimental/Assemblage, Gallery Artist" was the occupation I was best suited for. So began serious Art Education, the school library led to a large glossy color reproduction of Gottlieb's "Frozen Sounds 1." Black and red UFOs, a sideways face of God, above a frozen ochre world, In a zero snow filled sky. Was this the future, the past? I devoured Abstract Expressionism, from Pollock's drips to Rothko's call for Tragedy, Ecstasy, and Doom, the New York School - art that is big, bold, and primal. Art Education and Scholarships allowed my intellect to bloom, and allowed me to escape to the happenstance of birth and social class. Painting has given me everything I hold dear in my life, every place I have ever been, every friend. Painting saved my life.
I have been working in Brooklyn, New York City, since 2000, I have always lived and worked in an Art studio or turned wherever I found myself into a studio, I am always working, everyday doing something for Art. My process is ritualistic, surrendering to Arts demands, bringing to fruition what my imagination conjures, by hook or by crook. Always with a canvas going. The whole while, the material world of survival day jobs, teaching, multimedia collaborating, and pushing my art through fire - literally, twice I've faced studio fire, five years apart. And no matter what else, I have continued to do that. Art is Work is Life. Time is the Fire we burn in.
It was 2009, long hours at the drawing table, triggered a sciatica attack, crippling pain caused my pineal gland to activate, unleashing kaleidoscopic metaphysical visions alongside agony. Bedridden, each pain spike triggered an ecstatic panorama of worlds unseen. These experiences and my recovery caused an epigenetic change in my personhood and art practice. My art was no longer attempting to depict the imagination. I wrote a book about it,
The White Feathered Octopus.
Things became real.
I am a painter within the Western Esoteric Tradition of Sacred Geometry. My paintings are vessels, catalysts for a direct experience of the divine sought by a Mystic. Each canvas is a singular act of devotion created within the beholder’s eye .
Iason Ragnar Bellerophon
