BIO
Jarrett Camp (born 1980 is a Multicultural African American,) visual artist working primarily in stipple and pointillism methods but also works in a digital platform.
For me, my journey with Stipple started with two conversations with a high school student by the name of Roselyn and my art teacher.
I conversed with her after her field trip to an art museum. She mentioned to me that when she went to a gallery and saw artwork when she looked at it, she said why is this in a museum? I saw a piece that was just blue and green, and they called it artwork, why? I just don't get it.
Then two weeks before I graduated from high school my art teacher discovered that I had dyslexia. I was hurt because all this time in grade school I was being bullied and made fun of because I couldn't read nor comprehend any reading, I was finally told why. So I was in my bedroom crying because I went through school all this time not knowing that I had dyslexia, but as I was drawing on my art table one of the biggest discoveries in my career was born.
When using stipple I can see multiple images within images. I can see images upside down and right side up.
Then at the same time when I heard this from Roseyln, I was determined to develop a way that fulfills a person like her to come to a museum and find a solution for artwork that would give a source of better understanding and artwork that is not only fun to look at but also something that you didn't have to question is that art, and why do people like a certain movement of art?
While in college and knowing how to comprehend a book I started grabbing art books and studying the artwork without reading about and looking at them and questioning "what is art."
The Confusion
The Confusion’, exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.
Jarrett Camp created a unique category to describe his work:
1. Story
2. Elements of Mystery
3. Technique
4. Description
Octo - form - ism/ noun
Definition: A form of art that integrates pure essences of various methods and fuses them to create a single style.
Camp’s work marries abstraction, surrealism, and expressionism, graffiti, dadaism, comic book, sci-fi, landscapes, collages, into (forms, shapes, and color) with his unique brand of representational storytelling through stipple and pointillism.
When creating his work, Camp follows his formula, The Four Audience Intake Theory which involves four pillars.
Each pillar corresponds not only to different periods of human development but also to his journey and emulates each in the realization of his artwork.
Award-winning Los Angeles artist Jarrett Camp was born in Warren, Ohio, and grew up mostly in West Covina, California where he became fascinated with skateboard culture. He finds inspiration in the way the people of LA express their passion, whether it’s through skateboarding, fine art, or graffiti.
Dyslexia affects the left side of the brain impairing the ability to sort out language in the correct sequence, which in turn makes processing the alphabet extremely difficult. While this is a challenge, Camp has leveraged the inherent benefits of dyslexia — an aptitude for two-dimensional representation as well as three-dimensional design. For instance, when frustrated with his inability to get a piece of perspective perfectly, he’s been known to carve the problematic image out of an eraser at hand to use as a model from which to draw.
His work ranges in size from 18”x24” to upwards of 60” x 80”. He was using 1.1, 1.3, and 1.5-micron pens at 500-1000 dots per square inch on archival giclée paper. His work can take up to eight months to complete.
Jarrett Talks About The
The Four Audience Intake Theory
How my disability becomes a gift!
These are the plains in which my eyes create interwoven images. I see in 3D.
Because of my dyslexia, while I’m working on the first plain, my eyes automatically read the negative space, and can envision how the second plain will look.
In the second plain, my eyes turn negative space into positive space, and at the same time my dyslexia continues to reveal more negative space for the next plain.
In the third plane, I decide how far I want or need to go with the piece. Although I see in 3D which enables me to create complicated images, it puts a certain amount of stress on my brain to complete complex calculations – in other words, my mind is always going, so I need to make decisions about when to take a break when to stop, and when a piece is finished to my expectations.
