Jeremy Hush draws from a wealth of sources and influences. An avid world traveler, and a recognized initiate of the heavy metal and punk scenes, Hush has been creating work for zines and bands for years. Over the past few years he has been increasing his focus on his practice and exhibiting his art more extensively.
His work is haunting and beautiful, wild and chaotic, dark and saturated, but entirely unique. Influenced by the linear styles of 19th century prints and drawings, his work combines this suggestion to a historical aesthetic precedent with a contemporary inflection in content. Hush’s pieces feel like Grimm fairy tales, in the most visceral way possible prior to any of the sanitizing forces of Disney. They convey the solemnity of the ancient, and the guttural impulses of the nightmare. They are raw, they are meticulous, they are notably symbolic. The work feels allegorical in its dense allusion to nature and associative metaphor. The artist uses found materials to execute much of the work, everything from ball point pens, collected in the course of his itinerant travels, to coffee used for pigment, to inky fingerprints for crosshatching. The works’ sophistication belies the raw immediacy of their provenance.
“I do prefer figurative art. It just relates more to what I’ve always done. I never set out for any specific direction, when I was young. I just drew what was around me and what I thought about it. I see artists now pulling off some very interesting paintings of figurative art being broken back down for a purpose other than straight forward depictions. I wouldn’t be able to just begin smearing out parts of my pieces to try what others are doing. There has to be a subconscious draw in a certain direction, it doesn’t just happen over a night: there has to be a progression, in an artist’s work, that leads to such a change. I can’t define it because it hasn’t come my way, yet.” – Jeremy Hush – (Juxtapoz)
