Courtney Jacobs paintings represent a personal language created through the use of color, texture, composition, and action. By pushing, scraping, dripping, and throwing the paint she create’s a visual history of her own response to these complex and chaotic elements. It is an active process, intermingling various elements (line, spatter, drip, brushstroke, and squiggle) into one final composition.
As Courtney paint’s she is forever seeking the balance between negative/positive, lost/found, light/dark, thin and thick. For every “yin”, she searches for the “yang”. Courtney will juxtapose a great sweeping gesture against a calm breathing space, creating movement. Every splatter, gesture, and stroke is planned in terms of how it will affect the overall whole and where it can be mirrored elsewhere. She finds this harmony of seemingly contradictory visual ideas both beautiful and exciting.
It’s an intuitive process that requires as much looking as painting…perhaps even more. This intuitive process taps into the purely visual non-language right brain—a meditative unfolding that Courtney likens to “speaking in tongues.” Also known as “glossolalia,” speaking in tongues is “the vocalizing of fluent speech-like but unintelligible utterances, often as part of a religious practice”.
For Courtney the painting process has become a visual equivalent of glossolalia. Instead of vocalizing “fluent unintelligible utterances,” she let’s the paint act as her medium of meditation. The titles have been invented as a part of this process and are meant to be spoken aloud by the viewer.
Come meet Courtney Jacobs, take a look at her abstracts which are filled with emotion and movement, texture and color. Everyone sees and feels something different in every piece that she creates, ask her about her process of creating your favorite piece.
Bay Area artist Courtney Jacobs received her MFA from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She has shown her work in several locations, including the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Winter Park, FL; 79 New Montgomery Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and Dennis Rae Fine Art in San Francisco, CA. Her works have been purchased by many independent collectors, and she has been published in both “The Source”, and “Discover Livermore.” She has won several awards, including Best In Show at Abstract Exposure.com.
