Artist Profile: Jakub Barnard
Jakub
Barnard never set out to create the drawing he did, but it emerged from feelings he had at
the time in school. His drawing, done with Crayola marker, colored pencil, and ballpoint
pen, was a "random piece" in his sketchbook. Showing a figure in the foreground
staring out and three smaller, somewhat similar faces in the distance behind him,
Barnard's drawing is actually a "self-portrait," according to the artist. He is
the figure staring out from the foreground, away from the others."I did it in high school. Most of my art was dealing with the fact that I didn't like high school. It's a weird portrait of high school. This was my view of society, of everything seeming repetitive," he explains. The 1996 graduate of Buena High School in California usually does not plan out what his artwork is going to be, and this portrait was one that happened in an unplanned way. "I like the rawness of it," he says of the portrait, done for the AP Studio Art Drawing portfolio. "It's more pure than things that are planned out."
While there were things in high school that he did not like, AP was not one of them. He credits the AP Studio Art course for helping him to formulate his thoughts about his art and to photograph and document his work. He successfully both the AP Drawing and General Portfolios, receiving a 5 in each.
At 18, Barnard says he has done art "for a long time." His inclination to draw and paint came naturally from his family -- his mother was an artist. "She used to draw, and she encouraged me," Barnard says. "I started in kindergarten, fingerpainting, along with my twin sister." Quiet when he was a child, he says, he loved to observe and draw what he saw.
The quiet boy has given way to a young man who talks with excitement about the way his art continues to evolve and change all the time. "Every three months, I find my art takes a jump into a different thing or a different style," he says. Recently, he has worked on painting a "white-on-white" series of portraits, which he does in mixed media on wood, using everything from markers to joint compound or even toothpaste.
Now working as a visual production assistant where he lives in San Francisco, he plans to attend college in 1998. Especially interested in animation, Barnard says he wants to learn about special effects and possibly work on projects in which he incorporate his drawings and animate them.
He finds inspiration for his artwork in everyday experience and in the city around him. "Music inspires me a lot, especially the abstract forms that come from it. I also look at daily living going on and on and on "that inspires me," Barnard says. "And I inspire myself a lot."