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View more works by Jeff Faust
To be sure, Jeff Faust’s paintings are playful, whimsical, fanciful, everything that the benignly surreal usually entails. But as also tends to be the case with the surreal, whether benign or bizarre, lighthearted or dark, Faust’s paintings also possess a bit of melancholy. A bird draped in rich cloth suspended high above a coastline, a bowl on a table with leaves blowing out from its center, a ladder made of twigs leaning against a wooden bridge to and from nowhere amid the clouds. All images of the solitary. All sublime in their own peculiar way—sublimely peculiar, like most of Faust’s paintings—but still, an aloneness permeating all of them.
As calming as they are, as quiet, beautiful and meditative a state as they also often inspire, they are isolated, apart. Which is not to say, or even imply, that Faust’s paintings are sad or depressing; not at all. If anything, this underlying sense of solitude, of remove—and lest we forget, these are, after all, objects removed from their normal, expected context and devoid of people, or even just one human figure—all this gives Faust’s work oomph—without which his windblown leaves and drifting clouds would be little more than airy, cutesy and light, and lightly taken.
Loath to interpret his paintings, loath even to muse on his preference for certain objects—eggs, clouds, ropes, leaves, bowls and birds, among others—Faust admits only to having a fascination for these recurrent images. “I love simple images, I find great joy in simple things,” says the 55-year-old Faust, who spent a scant but memorable few years in his birth town of Newton, Connecticut, where his father ran the local newspaper, before being moved to southern California, where his father had taken the job of public-relations director for Claremont College. “A bird with a twig, a bowl and a cup of leaves blowing out of it is a wonderful image to me.” And, in Faust’s hands, exalted.
Surrounded by plenty of art and artistic types there on the citrusy grounds of Claremont, and gently encouraged by his parents, Faust developed a strong sense of independence, as did his three sisters (one of whom now works as a graphic designer). Knowing by ninth grade that he would be an artist, Faust dove into the many art books and art biographies in his parents’ book collection, and painted constantly. By the time he graduated from high school, though, his sense of self and his desire to get out overwhelmed any thoughts about college or art school.
So he hit the road—and in true Kerouackian fashion. “I had a remarkably strong wanderlust,” says Faust of those days. He spent three months in England, he hitchhiked through the States. Then he joined the carnival, working the Go-Karts and bumper cars, sleeping under trucks and eating corn dogs all day and much of that carny time spent in Oregon and Washington. “The carnival life was fabulous, especially visually,” recalls Faust. “It was unparalleled.”
One might think that after he’d gotten the travel bug out of his system, he’d have enrolled at a university or applied to art school. Never. If anything, Faust avoided both like the plague. “I had a strong sense of wanting to do it on my own,” asserts Faust, who wound up marrying a friend of his older sister’s, a former cheerleader and homecoming queen who’d gone to the same high school as he. “Plus, my father never encouraged me to go to art school, based on what he saw at the colleges. He was afraid I’d come under the tutelage of someone else and my gift would be stifled.”
That gift, however, hardly sprung up overnight. “It was a long, evolving process,” admits Faust of the style he likes to call “subtle surrealism,” or “visual forms of the written word.” “I arrived at my approach about 15 years ago. That’s when I realized, This is what I want to be saying. This is how I want to communicate on the canvas.”
Since that time, he’s pretty much stuck with the cloudscapes, the landscapes, the odd juxtapositions and slightly off combinations of objects and settings, nothing ever that straightforward, most of his pieces hinting at some sort of narrative. “The paintings, or the images, can be simplistic, but they have that gentle surrealistic thing in there, too,” says Faust. “There are various stories in these images. They offer various stories to various people.”
Always possessed of a vivid imagination, and a voracious reader from early on, Faust remembers being especially struck by the work of Joan Miró back in high school. “Miró just did something to me,” recalls Faust, whose middle name is Manet. (Two of his sisters also have the middle names of artists: one is Cezanne and another is Matisse.) “I don’t know what it was about his work, but it just inflamed me.”
Magritte and Dalí and some of the other Surrealists were a strong influence as well. “I love craft and the craft of good painting,” says Faust. “And even though nine-tenths of the art world is a complete mystery to me, the one-tenth that does get to me is like fertilizer. It helps everything grow.” And grow and grown. “My work produces thoughts,” he adds. “So when I’m working my work is producing more thoughts.”
More thoughts, more images, more ideas for more paintings, even though he never starts out with a set idea on what he wants the canvas to be when it’s done. “I never know when I face a canvas what I’m going to encounter,” says Faust, who prefers acrylics to oil for just such purposes. “I use acrylics because they work perfectly for me. I work fast and change my ideas a lot. There’s not a set script. They offer me tremendous freedom.”
But as the politicians like to say, with all that freedom comes responsibility—and challenges. “Sometimes I am up against a brick wall with how to paint a cloud and I’ll think, I’ve been doing this for years, why is this suddenly a problem?,” explains Faust. “That’s when I know I can’t just take it for granted. You have to be honest with your canvas. I only slip when I’m not honest with myself and the canvas.”
It’s that honesty that separates his paintings from those that are equally surreal yet merely quirky. Despite an avowed aversion to complexity, Faust’s paintings are complex. In that paradoxical way that the most simple things often can be. “I tend to want to retreat to a simple view and I get strength in that,” says Faust. “There’s nothing loud in them. Life is so loud these days. We’re bombarded with loud music and loud images and loud people. I’m trying to create these windows I can look at in order to recenter myself. Windows that can recenter myself but also give people a respite from the world, too, and maybe help them recenter themselves as well.”
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