Jason Harvey: Peace Tree

Review by John Goodrich, guest contributor

 

 

Artists are seekers. Some search for insights into cultural habits and circumstances; often they end up finding something else — a deeper sense of their own social role. Other artists concentrate on faithfully drawing and painting the objects around them. They’re liable to eventually arrive at a more elemental and solitary realization: what it means to exist in light and space. Judging from the drawings and paintings in the quietly luminous exhibition “Peace Tree,” Jason Harvey (1919-1982) belongs to this second group of seekers.

 

Harvey came from a family of painters that included his sister Anne and son Steven (curator of “Peace Tree”). Jason’s work has seldom been on view; it was last exhibited in 2002, in the New York Studio School’s show “Family Line,” which featured the work of all three family members. During a peripatetic childhood, Jason lived in Chicago, New York, Sante Fe and France. Though duly noted by his parents, his artistic gifts were overshadowed by the precociously talented Anne. In his early adulthood Jason worked as an art director at advertising agencies, later turning to furniture design and to fabricating custom lamps. But in his early 40s, he made the leap to fine art, and began drawing the objects and scenes around him. By his next decade, he was painting as well.

The 14 drawings and four paintings in the exhibition mostly depict the interior of his studio loft on Cooper Square. Small in scale, they feel exceptionally intimate, capturing his surroundings with a spirited but disciplined lyricism. Built up from rapid cross-hatchings of ink or compressed charcoal, their tones create richly atmospheric effects — not just an all-purpose depth, but particular scenarios of light. Subtle shadings in the pen-and-ink drawing “Peace Tree” adroitly delineate its spaces: a sunlit tree viewed through a doorway, its leaves eloquently summarized; the lightly limned details of wall and door on either side. Hanging next to it, a portrait of a refrigerator, centering a kitchen wall, recalls James Castle in its mute personableness — though Harvey possesses a considerably more agile touch. In several views of studio corners, the artist’s robust sense of design steers the evocative tones, animating the rise of a wood burning stove’s stack, and the visual stutter of bags, cans, and boxes arrayed about the floor.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, in a 1979 self-portrait, the artist eyes himself with soulful intensity. The mysteries of the visual, implicit in all these drawings, turns explicit in “Dream,” in which dense ink cross-hatchings hint at figures emerging from the swirl of sky/trees above a nascent landscape. A night scene of the Manhattan skyline somehow extracts a delicate dusk light from a densely textured charcoal sky.

Among the paintings, an image of a plate of apples on a chair stands out, as does a second roof-top view. Both use the luscious dimensionality of color to conjure the workings of light.

“The pictures have told me today that my home is in the making,” reads an entry in the artist’s personal journal. Are some of these very same “pictures” hanging in the exhibition? In any event, one senses throughout these works an elemental, mutual affirmation between artist and subject: a sheltering home, repaying the artist’s devotion to its particularities of light and space.

Jason Harvey: Peace Tree at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, NYC, NY February 8–March 8, 2025