Jason Pitzl

Lives and works in Vancouver, WA, USA

Artist statement

I create drawings and paintings using oil-based paints and pastels to explore the liminal spaces between the mythic and the deeply personal. My art has always been a journey, an effort to understand both myself and the people around me, and to share this process of understanding with the outside world. These drawings and paintings utilize a series of archetypes and figures from myth that work to draw the viewer deeper into the primal need for meaning and connection in a world that increasingly devalues such explorations as impractical at best, or suspect at worst. I create art that demands time and attention, that through the sheer force of its creation draws the viewer ever-deeper into a numinous reality which spirals through both existential despair and an egoless ecstasy. My work manifests in two ongoing threads that feed off of and comment on each other. My oil paintings are grand statements, large-scale Jungian sweeps that utilize traditionally expressionist models of creation, line, and color, to, as Austrian painter and composer Arnold Schoenberg put it, “express what is essential.” The oil pastel drawings are a daily meditation and practice, a running dialog and companion to the paintings that allows me to document my day-to-day experiences in a manner that keeps me grounded in the empathy of human experience. While deeply indebted to artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch, and Max Beckmann, I’m also influenced by artist-illustrators like Pamela Colman Smith...

Artwork