About Jeffery Roth

Bio

Jeffery Roth is an artist who lives and works in his native

Northern California. Fusing his classic fine/studio arts

training with the art director/ designer’s eye developed in

his entertainment industry career, Jeffery has recently

turned his focus to a long-held passion: watercolor.

“Growing up in Carmel had a profound effect on my

aesthetic sensibilities. For one thing, it’s an area of

stunning natural beauty and for that reason it drew some

of the greatest visual artists in the country: Legends such

as Brett Weston, Ansel Adams from the photography

world, and also my personal mentors Alexander Wygers

and Donald Teague. It was Teague who opened my eyes

to the splendor of water color, the most difficult and yet

undoubtedly most magical medium through which to

celebrate nature, architecture and especially waterscapes

bathed in the unique quality of light we have on this

coastline.”

Roth spent seminal years of his youth enjoying Teague’s

avuncular company when the painter was in his 70s and

80s, happy to tutor an eager young painter and share

some warmth and insight.

“It sounds silly but it is true that he was like a Zen master

who could illustrate and sum up his hard-won wisdoms in

delightful, short observations and anecdotes. He told me

that he would often “see” his future painting of a

landscape when first gazing on it and would make a fast,

small, sketchy watercolor of it on the spot to capture that

vision. He would also take a photo for detail reference

later, but that first sketch usually had all the key elements

that went into his great works. It had all been there in his

eye’s first glimpse. To me that sums up his mastery of the

medium and it’s the ideal I work toward. And his words

on economy in painting is my mantra: “Say just enough to

catch them and let their minds fill in the rest.”

Roth has some of his own ideas on how to “say just

enough.” His medium-small canvases depicting bridges,

buildings, forests and coastal surf-scapes have earned

praise from many quarters from where varied

enthusiasms can be glimpsed by a selection of their

adjectives: “haunting,” “melancholy,” “uplifting,”

“dazzling,” and, perhaps most often, “luminescent.” But

many have admitted to being caught off guard by Roth’s

at times unusual framing of his subjects (the foot of one

pier under the Golden Gate Bridge; a patch of foam surf

with no horizon or foreground, only a lone bather off near

one distant corner). These choices bring us fragments of

a larger frame the viewer will probably construct for

themself.

“Too often paintings have a kind of snapshot framing that

presents views as we already know them, offering nothing

new to consider. I try to show my visions, rather than the

version we’ve all seen, I want you to see it again for the

first time. But more importantly my framing choices are

attempts to make my own sense of views, lines,

compositions. Great paintings and photographs are more

than the sum of their parts. They contain an invisible

magic that raises them as art. By torquing my framing and

focusing on smaller details in a bigger scene I believe I’m

searching for that hidden subtext, maybe a sacred

geometry that hints at the magic.”