Observation is the cornerstone of creation—and that’s very much the way Joe Fig sees his role an artist. The Sarasota-based painter, sculptor, and author got his start in the 1980s working at the Bowery studio of a German expressionist-style painter who liked to listen to jazz as he worked. Those tunes, and the distinct smells of the oil paints and rabbit-skin glue used to stretch canvases, are forever imprinted in Fig’s memory.
“It was something from another time,” says Fig of that formative period when he first noted the preparation that comes in advance of endeavor. “I just loved being there.”
A decade later, when he enrolled in the graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Fig tapped into those memories. “I started looking at the studio as a form of portraiture and how each different studio reflects an artist’s own creative process, and, consequently, part of the artist’s personality,” he says. Over the years, these musings have inspired Fig’s own work (which includes a large oeuvre of oil paintings and sculptures, as well as two books that explore the artistic process) and they very much inform his new exhibition at the Sarasota Art Museum, Contemplating Vermeer (November 17, 2024 to April 13, 2025).
The show focuses on 16 paintings from Fig’s Contemplations series, which resulted from a 2023 trip he took to Amsterdam to catch a sold-out exhibition at the Rijksmuseum featuring 80 works by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. While at the showing, Fig took hundreds of photos focusing on the visitors admiring Vermeer’s famous masterpieces. Once back home, he recreated those photographic scenes in explicit detail in a group of oil paintings.
“When I was a student, I remember a teacher saying that you can always tell when an artist is at a museum or gallery because they look at the art differently from other people,” says Fig, who serves as chair for the departments of fine arts and visual arts at the Ringling College of Art and Design. “While others step back to appreciate them, we get up close trying to investigate how they were made.”
Curated by Rangsook Yoon, the exhibition at the Sarasota Art Museum will be arranged similar to the way the Rijksmuseum show Fig attended was composed, something the artist is delighted about.
“I can’t wait to see how it’s going to look,” says Fig. “People looking at my work of people looking at Vermeer’s work. Should be interesting.”
Story Credits:
Text by Kelley Marcellus
Photos courtesy of Joe Fig
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