KRISTIN BONELLI
Courtesy Photo
“Wat er binnen zit” (What’s Inside”) by Jason Healy is 72 inches x 48 inches and made with oil, pencil, pastel and collage on canvas.
Jason Healy: Color and Landscape
Art therapist and teacher Jason Healy shows his clients and students how to express themselves creatively and affectively. Though acutely aware of the importance of the arts while growing up, Healy did not pursue his own talents seriously until the age of 29. Healy shows two styles of representation in his paintings. His large, textured color field studies are abstract, and his landscape and interior scenes are painted with a dreamlike realism. Both beg for stories to be told.
In his color field studies, Healy explained, “I start with a color—maybe yellow and white—and then I try to get a conversation going with the colors… What are they asking for in terms of movement? Then the colors start getting into an argument and then come around again to a resolution.”
Healy said he feels, “There is an objective quality to each color,” as he tries to bring the viewer into studying the basic elements of each hue he uses. While Healy shows the viewer the true, objective nature of the colors he profiles for his studies, it is difficult not to be lured into the great conversation that he describes and concoct one’s own story about how the lines and textures arrived where they did on his canvas.
In his landscapes, Healy paints “what I love around me—places that I go to around my home. Layers of landscape. I just jump right in with pencil, board and oil paints.”
These series of paintings offer warm colors, soft tones and strong character. The abandoned car on the side of a road or the solitary tree stretching over an empty field read as scenes from a short story or cinematic vignettes—slices of life Healy encounters while out and about in nature. Here, Healy’s hazy pallet reveals snippets of memory and place, which is what Healy enjoys representing—his favorite places in and around his community.
Healy’s paintings can be found at www.jasonhealy.com and will be on display at the Loring-Greenough House for this year’s Jamaica Plain Open Studios (JPOS), marking Healy’s 11th year participating.
JPOS is celebrating its 15th year as the premiere annual arts event in one of Boston’s most exciting neighborhoods. JPOS will showcase 220 artists at 75 sites. The event is open to the public and will take place Sept. 27 through 28 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information and to preview artists’ work, visit www.jpopenstudios.com or call 943-7819.
JPOS is supported in part by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council, a local agency which is funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, administrated by the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism and Special Events.
The author is a volunteer with the Jamaica Plain Arts Council.