Rectangles may sound terribly common for those of you who are unfamiliar with the works of Phil Jarvis, but he hasn’t painted inside a box in over 12 years. His human sized, irregular shaped, psychologically autobiographic canvases with their elaborately contorted hardwood frames have been his long standing artistic mark.

  Jarvis admits that as a painter he’s had a split personality. One side of him has been evolving as an artist, beginning as a child, through his years as a student at Washington University, and into his professional years since. The other side developed from his 35 years as a sign painter in a small shop in North St. Louis County called B&N Signs. “I always had a clean separation between the two ways of thinking when I worked at B&N, Jarvis says. I did signs during the day, then after work I developed another way of looking at the world through my personal art. The lines of separation aren’t so clear now that I am self-employed.“  He left the sign shop three years ago and has since grown his own business by hand painting enameled signs and wall murals. “My sign painting shares time with my artwork these days,” Jarvis says.   The 3 Rectangular shaped works, from which the show at Concrete Ocean is titled, are the collaboration of the sign painting Phil Jarvis and his curious inner artist. On these three substrates are the combined disciplines from both worlds.  “I like this new direction, Jarvis says. I can see a fresh world of exploration released by this new internal conversation.”  

 Concrete Ocean Art Gallery will display these new works side by side with the irregular shaped canvases Phil Jarvis is so well known for.

http://philjarvispaintings.com