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For this, his fourth solo exhibition at McMurtrey Gallery, Robert Jessup has created a body of paintings both very much like and unlike anything he has done before.
His previous works were easily identifiable by their thick impasto and excessive scumbling, as well as the imaginative characters and fanciful narratives he portrayed. In a desire for greater descriptive clarity, Mr. Jessup has begun painting on smooth, flat grounds rather than textured surfaces, which has allowed him to paint more realistic as opposed to stylized figures. However, Mr. Jessup is not interested in painting what is real. In his own words he explains, "…I still don't paint from life, and I don't really want to. I like making it all up. And because everything--the proportions, the light, the space, the surfaces--is made up, no matter how much I think something is looking like what I think it looks like, there is always a strangeness. But then, that's the way it has always been with my paintings.
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They still form themselves as I paint them, very much like dreams."
This, more than anything, is what attracts most people to Mr. Jessup's work. His paintings describe a place neither here nor there; part memory, part imagination. They are both awkward and beautiful, and they show us what we might otherwise only see with our eyes closed. That is unless you come from a place where people balance fish or teacups on their heads, or push boulders uphill while nude. With the imagination of a child and skill of a seasoned painter, Robert Jessup creates paintings that have the unique ability to both unsettle and delight us at the same time.
Mr. Jessup's paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; as well as many public, private, and corporate collections.
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 Robert Jessup 2005 Bio
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