"Sites of Arrival" Group Show

Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts
August 8-17, 2025

Opening August 8, 6-9 PM

1012 N. Dearborn St.
Chicago, IL 60610

Office phone: 312 642 4400
Office email: fineart1012@sbcglobal.net

I have been showing works done from life at the Palette and Chisel for several years. Such studies are very helpful for training the eye and are entirely consistent with the P&C’s founding mission: to provide a place to draw, paint and sculpt from the model, and to show the resulting artwork.

At the same time I have long maintained a practice of drawing and painting from imagination, sometimes deriving finished work in the studio from life studies. Lessons learned from painstaking work from life can blossom in the studio into more complex, multi-figure compositions, wide-open spaces, and otherworldly color palettes.

Some of the work shown here was begun decades earlier and tinkered with slowly over the years, each piece going back on the shelf for long periods of time, and then coming out when inspiration strikes or the solution to some unresolved problem suddenly becomes clear. Bodo’s suggestion to join this show gave me the welcome nudge to complete some of these long-evolving pieces.

I view each drawing or painting as a unique experiment in solving certain problems simultaneously. The bedrock requirement of an artwork is that it makes sense at the level of design, while also obeying the laws of perspective, light, and anatomy, as well as the artist’s own interior laws, which are only revealed through the process of painting itself.

I am suspicious of paintings where the outcome seems to have been decided in advance. Each of these pieces is as much a surprise to me as it may be to the viewer. Their logic is their own, though I have tried to fill in the blanks. As one of my art heroes, Gregory Gillespie, once said, “Paintings make sense if I paint them beautiful enough.” Pretty much sums it up, though he set a high bar in that regard.

John Jacobsen was born in Madison, Wisconsin in the previous millennium. He studied art and physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and received his Ph.D. in 1996. In addition to his work as an artist, Jacobsen has had a long career as a physicist and software engineer, traveling extensively to such places as CERN (Geneva), Hawaii, Europe, and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, which he has visited ten times in his work on the AMANDA and IceCube astrophysical experiments.

After living and exhibiting in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1997-2002, he moved to Chicago, where he currently lives.

Jacobsen’s artwork is influenced by his travels, as well as his artistic idols, which include Gregory Gillespie, Odd Nerdrum, Andrew Wyeth, and American “Golden Age” illustrators. His teachers have included notable printmakers Jack Damer and David H. Becker at UW-Madison, and the painters Steven Assael and Andrew S. Conklin at the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago.

Thanks to Bodo Stolczenberger for helping to arrange this show.