Jamie Treacy
December 2-3, 11am - 5pm
Jamie Treacy is an Oakland, California-based visual artist, masters swimmer and art educator. He received his BFA at the University of Michigan and his MFA from CCA (both degrees in painting and drawing). He also holds a Single Subject Visual Art credential and a Career Technical Education credential in Arts, Media and Entertainment.
Jamie’s artwork is imbued with themes of eco-justice, speculative fiction and exo-biology. He creates bodies of work in painting, drawing and mixed media that draw imagery from underwater worlds, the forest and his internal landscape.
His philosophy as an art educator is that all youth deserve access to a high-quality arts education, and that creative inquiry is fundamental to solving the most pressing problems of our future.
Jamie is the recipient of the William H. Lewis Watercolor award and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation fellowship. Jamie’s work has been exhibited in the California Bay Area, Canada, Mexico and Japan. He currently works for the Oakland Unified School District as an arts instructional coach.
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Artist Statement:
I’m fascinated by the practice of “putting an idea on the table.” This phrase, used frequently in my life as an art educator is meant to be a way for us to share a thought, without being emotionally attached to it… so it can be examined, and improved. Instead of it being my idea, it’s now an independent thing in the world that we can work on together. I thought about using that same process in putting an emotion on the table—to examine it, and let it live beyond my body.
To be able to talk about a feeling without it holding me hostage.
My painting practice takes the idea on the table and makes it into a physical thing, even if it’s an unnameable thing. A spectrum of my inner world is on display — from turbulent anxiety, to precise centeredness. I think of these paintings as telling a psychological story. Its a cast of characters that resist easy identification, but invite wondering. These paintings on canvas are made with translucent color layers, acrylic mediums and paper pulp. I brush, scrape, smear, sand at the surface until a tarnished vibrancy emerges. The pictorial space is a churning and stormy world that exists somewhere from quantum to galactic scale.
I don’t know where that place is, but I’ve felt that way before. And I survived it.