Bill Jehle Projects

Colony Ink Drawings From 2017 and 2018

These ink sketches were made over the summers of 2017 and 2018 at our family’s cabin near Westcliffe Colorado. These were all constructed basically the same way. I walked around until I saw something I liked. Then I would do a quick pencil sketch or even better just an ink sketch, work in some basic […]

February 28, 2019
How We Made Anabasis

What if we start constructing an image based solely on a GM grid with no predetermined outcome or image. That is a picture that is a picture of itself not of something else. To further isolate this from gestural and arbitrary mark making it was necessary to confine the lines and shapes to vertexes on […]

March 12, 2018
exalted objects: solitary and terrible

Riffing on Roland Barthes: The object in view assumes an exalted place: modern painting is a painting of the object. In it, Nature becomes a fragmented space, made of objects solitary and terrible because the links between them are only potential. Nobody chooses them for a privileged meaning, or a particular use, or some service; nobody […]

January 12, 2018
AutoCAD VAJRAS

I made a pile of both drawings and paintings based on an abstract conception of human chakra system. I won’t go into what that is-if you don’t know give it a quick google. My drawings (I called them CANDLES) looked kind of like this on the right: I have 30 more or less of these […]

March 25, 2017
Suite of Six Etchings at El Morro Editions

in 2012 we produced a small suite of six etchings at el moro editions studio in los osos, ca

November 20, 2016
REPEATING PAST MISTAKES

I revived this painting from 1976. I pulled it out of the drawer where it’s been laying for almost 40yrs. I always liked the piece and thought I would come back to it sometime and flesh out the issues it raised. It had some elements of that cool detachment that was popular in some abstract […]

February 12, 2016
Constance Mallinson on the Meditation Drawings

The graphic works of Bill Jehle have many art historical antecedents from the hybrid creatures of Hieronymous Bosch to Surrealism’s automatic writing and stream of consciousness imagery, German Expressionist caricatures, the ink drawings of Picasso, Jackson Pollock’s swirling cosmic seas, and more recently, the head comics of the psychedelic age. As with most contemporary art, […]

April 26, 2013
Unter Eichen

Under Oaks is a series That came about from living in an oak forest here in Topanga. Our property is host to at least 80 imposing Coast Live Oaks (and they host us). The Chumash, I heard, called them “los dedos del diablo.” After living here awhile you begin to understand why Quercus agrifolia are […]

September 27, 2012
Brian McNeece on Leonidas

Leonidas, June 9, 2012 I don’t have an emotional response when I first see it. Like some people, because of the many pencil lines left from the drafting stage, I tend to think that it’s not finished. The painting is a profile view of the whole dog cut with pencil lines in very complex geometric […]

September 21, 2012
Leonidas, King of Dogs

Leonidas: Named after the great king of the Spartans elected to defend Greece from the combined armies of Xerxes at Thermopylae in 481BCE. For you, inhabitants of wide-wayed Sparta, Either your great and glorious city must be wasted by Persian men, Or if not that, then the bound of Lacedaemon must mourn a dead king, […]

June 11, 2012