Jeffrey Rothstein

Jeffrey studied photography under the post-war New York School photographers, Jerry Liebling and Elaine Mays and painting with Arthur Hoener, a color field painter and disciple of Josef Albers at Hampshire College in the early 80's. Post college, he was a photo assistant to modern masters Richard Avedon, and Bruce Weber while attending The Whitney Independent Study program studying with guest artists Richard Serra and Brice Marden. He segued into the art world when Paul Morris invited him to show his series of underwater nudes at his Chelsea gallery in the late 90's. Jeffrey's diverse body of work deals with evocative meditations on the nexus of painting and photography as well as the themes of art history with respect to specific periods of painting and with his Duets series, the contemporary art world itself. His photographic work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, researched at length before embarking to a specific location to photograph. His images are shot on film and are often altered and balanced digitally before printing. For his Zion Canyon series, he studied with a professor of Chinese Art history and a curator of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum focusing on scroll paintings of the Tang and Song dynasties. This body of work is not about recording the actual appearance of the natural world. Instead, Jeffrey distills his impressions as did the painters of the Song Dynasties to create works that idealize the natural world and emphasize the graphic qualities that enable him to translate nature into an essential impressionistic medium that conveys the energy and spirit of the landscape. His series Nature/ Mie kagure, "Hidden and seen", the term means the landscape is to be revealed to you as you walk through it, was inspired by Japanese block prints of the Meiji and Edo periods. Known as "Ukiyo-e" prints, the artists of those eras used as their subject matter the evanescent floating world that exists between imagination and reality; mythology and history; a view caught in a glance; a sudden shower of rain; a crashing wave; a dramatic landscape intensified by the imagination of the artist. Jeffrey made two extended visits to Japan to work with modern printmakers in their studios to learn printmaking techniques and to photograph in Kyoto, Nagano and Hakone that are depicted in some of the most famous prints. His new body of work, New Landscapes, continues his examination of painterly space. Making classical works that are both bold in their simplicity as well as intangible, since the images appear as if they have been viewed through a layer of glass or are rippling on the surface of water. In this way, the landscapes can seem like apparitions, dissolving and resolving when viewed from different distances. Born in 1960 in Northampton, Massachusetts. He lives and works in New York City and Woodstock, NY.