Jeremy Geddes (also known as Jem or Jez) is a young Australian painter born in New Zealand; at a very young age he moved to Melbourne where he studied painting in the early 90s and earned a BA and a postgrad degree at Victorian College of the Arts. Afterwards he worked in video games as an art director but in 2003 he returned to painting full time and has since had his paintings published and exhibited around the world. He’s been published in several books and magazines, picking up a Spectrum Gold Award for his comic cover Doomed. Today he lives and works in Melbourne.
His art captures surreal, fantastical moments freezing his images in moments out of time. His urban landscapes are inhabited by lonely, ambiguous figures, whose incongruous presence creates a mysterious resonance with the void around, forcing the viewer to wonder about their meaning: “The cosmonaut paintings are a step away from my old method of painting, where every element was strictly controlled to enforce a particular narrative. I found that controlling the structure too tightly limited the stories that the viewer could bring to it. With these paintings I’m trying to leave the narrative ambiguous and open to interpretation, whilst juxtaposing enough disparate elements to make some sort of interpretation necessary. I’m keen to never give enough clues to block any potential explanation the viewer might bring. I want to spark questions, rather than answer them.”
Jeremy often takes months to complete a single painting, sketching and painting studies and details long before beginning the final piece. Yet, despite the realism of his work, he doesn’t see them as photorealistic, instead offering that he is merely “attempting to follow in the path of the Academic painters of the 19th century.” Whether an Academic or a Realist, Jeremy uses the detail to craft a world the viewer is able to connect with, to feel, to react to, and isn’t that the point of art in the first place?
