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Born: 1936 Nairobi, Kenya
Lives and works in Humboldt County, California
Jesse Allen has been a highly visible staple of the Bay Area art community for over forty years and continues to expand the breadth of his work. Jesse’s richly detailed techniques create a visual maze to follow through the entire work, weaving a spiritual portrait of a place. Allen’s personal mythologies denote symbolism to each individual plant, creature, and earth form in his pieces, creating complex visual narratives.
Allen takes most of his imagery from the landscape of Kenya, where he was born and lived until his late teens. He received a degree in modern languages from St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, England. Allen cites the two years following his graduation, spent living in Milan, as fundamental to his development as a painter. An entirely self-taught artist, Allen moved to the United States to teach, and eventually left his post as a language professor at Stanford University to pursue painting full-time.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2010 Morris Graves Museum, Eureka, CA (upcoming)
2009 Aqua Art Miami, Miami, FL
2009 Los Gatos Museum of Art, Los Gatos, CA
2009 Chandler Fine Art, San Francisco, CA
2008 Chandler Fine Art, San Francisco, CA
2007 Art Now, Miami Beach, FL
2007 AAF Art Fair, New York, NY
2007 Brentwood City Hall Gallery, Brentwood, CA
2007 Laney College Art Gallery, Oakland, CA
2006 Chandler Fine Art, San Francisco, CA
2006 AAF Art Fair, New York, NY
2005 Chandler Fine Art, San Francisco, CA
1991 The International Triennial Competition of Print, Osaka, Japan
1985 Minsukishi Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1978 Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH
1977 Gibson Gallery, State University College, Potsdam, NY
1977 Museum of North Orange County, Fullerton, CA
1976 Humboldt Cultural Center, Eureka, CA
1975 Lawrence Hall of Science, University of Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
1975 Art Gallery, Central Wyoming College, Riverton, WY
1975 Museum of Art, Universtiy of Wymoming, Laramie, WY
1975 George Amos Memorial Library, Gillette, WY
1974 Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA
1974 Carnegie Public Library, Fine Arts Center, Rock Springs, Wyoming
1974 Universtiy of Colorado Gallery, Boulder, CO
1974 Museum Gallery, Alberta College of Art, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
1974 Bernard Levinson & Associates, San Francisco, CA
1973 Hastings Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1973 Bauhaus II, Greene Farms, CT
1972 Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, Kenya
1971 San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA
1970 Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA
1969 Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA
1969 The Northern Arizona University Art Gallery, Flagstaff, AZ
1968 University of San Francisco, San Francisco Medical Center, San Francisco, CA
VA Kolve on Jesse Allen's paintings
Jesse Allen is a painter of uncommon originality and power. His forebears were early settlers in Africa- immigrants to the Cape in 1820, and then pioneers in Natal. His childhood and adolescence were spent near the Rift Valley of Kenya and the wilderness, loneliness, and innocence of that landscape and its creatures- birds, animals, trees- have been preserved and metamorphosed into new worlds of the painter's imagination, an inner country for the mind which these paintings, one at a time, delineate with absolute sureness and authenticity. They are not paintings of Africa: the animals are imaginary, as fantastic as any of the creatures of a medieval bestiary, and possessed of an extravagant beauty. Giraffes with necks like tall trees laden with fruit share landscape with fat, waddling sea-birds, squat, jewel-like turtles, sinuous snakes, polychrome monkeys, and beings at some disturbing middle distance between animals and men. There are small creatures everywhere-an infinite fecundity of life is here being celebrated, hard and clear, without sentimentality. Trees bear black fruit beneath blue suns, rocks and moons are cut open like agate to reveal an inner geometry of beauty. Animals stare directly at the beholder, startled but unblinking, declaring kinship: often they are locked violently together in an ambiguous act of death or love, with only fountains of blood erupting like flowers to suggest the final issue. There is a beauty in this world, and tranquility-as if Eden were recreated as a place-but it is a peculiar African kind of innocence that can include death and terror, staged in a universe whose sky, hung with multiples suns like the shields of Masai warriors, looks down impassively on what happens below. This artist works almost entirely in closed patterns: even his wildest skies, when they open beyond the frame of a picture, open with lines that imply their own ultimate union. His version of violence is curiously harmonious- it is never a singular, aberrant event- for its rhythms are reflected in the trees, rocks, the flowers, the skies; and those same rhythms control the pictures that concern an ideal serenity, and give them a fine masculine strength. The violence, the eroticism, the stillness, all are one-a unitive vision (in something of the mystic's sense of that term) of the forces that lie beneath nature and are its truth. His art is closer to impersonation than to imitation- it is everywhere anthropomorphic-for it proceeds as do primitive dancers in ritual animal dances, incorporating themselves into the objects of their fear or desire.
V A Kolve, UCLA Foundation Chair Professor of English, Emeritus
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