Jason Van Pelt
Jason Van Pelt is a contemporary artist living in New Orleans, LA, creating illustrative, representational works depicting the people and places that resonate from his surroundings. Jason gravitated toward art early on, attending the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts in high school. He studied Fine Art at LSU before pursuing a career in digital design and web development. This relationship between traditional and digital media permeates his work. His process incorporates photography that is digitally illustrated, where he experiments with interpretation, shapes, mark-making, and limited color palettes, before finishing as acrylic paintings on canvas.
Jason is inspired by Pop Art’s exploration of beauty and purpose in everyday objects and culture. While he spent years practicing portraiture and realism, it wasn’t until he began experimenting with minimalism that he found an approach that had the impact he envisioned. As his editorial choices have broadened, he still considers all of his paintings as portraits, regardless of whether the subject is a person, a leaf, or a window.
Jason’s themes are personal, yet he strives to tell universal stories, creating a shared nostalgia with the viewer. He finds subtleties in his environment, removing distractions, focusing only on what is necessary to tell a story. His childhood often appears in his work through references to life in New Orleans: philodendrons and tropical foliage, indigenous trees, and local architecture.
Artist’s Statement
The goal of my work is to capture authentic experiences that reject the insincerity of consumerism and faux luxury. I attempt to do so by creating art that depicts sublime moments, objects & scenes of beauty, and portraits of notable people, with the hope of connecting with others in a shared nostalgia.
I’m inspired by the simplicity of iconography and its ability to reduce an idea or subject to its essence, focusing on a primary characteristic or inherent truth. I choose limited palettes to emphasize specific color relationships and accentuate the shapes and lines of my compositions.
My style employs a flat, illustrative approach that favors a lack of brushstrokes, mimicking the perfection possible with a machine or printed process, while allowing the imperfection inherent in the human hand to remain present and unmistakable.
My hope is to invite the viewer to look deeper into the picture, both metaphorically into the subject matter, as well as physically into the execution of the painting, to wonder whether it was produced by man or machine. I aim to provide the audience with a depth of experience, encouraging them to get close to the work and wonder not only “why was this done?” but also “how was this done?”
https://jvpfineart.com/
