With layers of paint, Jake Kenobi creates tableaux that mimic layers of the human psyche—bright glimpses of colorful palm trees and flamingos are juxtaposed with macabre symbols of death.
At his studio in northwest Bend, the artist, who goes by the moniker Spring Break Jake, presents contradictions. Dressed in black from head to toe, his wide grin offers a welcome to his world, one he shares with his young son, Casper, age 2 ½, and his wife, Kait, owner and graphic designer at Midnight Grim. Surrounded by paints and works in progress, Kenobi uses art as a tool for connection with others and the world around him.
Creative from a young age in Minnesota, where he was born and raised, he had an intense bout of depression in high school that led him to express himself through the arts—first music, then graphic design, and ultimately, fine art.
“The depression taught me empathy,” he said. “I realized, ‘What if everyone was going through something?’ I found compassion through art, and it gave me an outlet to share a message.”
In Bend, Kenobi credits a 2019 mural project and his 2021 residency at Scalehouse Collective for the Arts as cornerstones for his work as a full-time artist. Spending eight months painting in the Patricia Clark Studio reinforced the wiring of his brain, he said. Painting full time allowed him to communicate his past experiences.
Scalehouse was an incubator, and his show at the Scalehouse Annex was an emergence from the dark into a new phase. “He has chosen to work with symbolic motifs which not only define an aesthetic, but help him to express himself as an artist,” said Marley Weedman Lorish, operations and programming manager and incoming executive director of Scalehouse.
His paintings begin with handmade wood panels prepared with gesso. He adds layers of acrylic paint, incorporating found materials to create spots with a sculptural quality. He equates building depth and three-dimensionality with exploring the layers of his life experiences. A painting may have five to 15 layers of paint, with final top coats of black. The visible colors or white are negative space, and Kenobi creates the outlines of those shapes first, so that they remain portals to the base, much as a glimpse into the psyche.
His work can appear simple, with few elements on each canvas, but each painting has a deeper meaning. The overt subject matter of skulls and tones of darkness belie Kenobi’s deeper thinking of subjects such as neuroscience and philosophy. For Kenobi, the irony of the playful name Spring Break Jake provokes thoughts of how we should celebrate life. The philosophical concept of momento mori, Latin for remembering death, is a theme in his work, he said. Momento mori is a motivation to live, with the understanding that time, and life, are finite. There’s a playfulness to the graphic design work Kenobi has done for companies such as Avid Cider, 10 Barrel and Somewhere That’s Green. Skeletons dance in a series he created for Visit Bend’s Bend Ale Trail as a reminder to live fully while we are still alive.
His new collection, “Night Life,” diverges in its palette from pinks to swaths of yellow, green and grey, and focuses on themes of insomnia and the vulnerability of a human mind that goes without regenerative hours of sleep. The body of work will debut at a solo show, opening June 1 at the Purple Door gallery in Portland.
“I hope to create vulnerability in my paintings by looking inward,” Kenobi said. “Ultimately, I want to create solidarity and compassion around a shared experience,” he added. “Once a piece is done, it’s not about me anymore.”
See more at springbreakjake.com.
