Just keep painting, — Jacob Dhein

Artists. Special people. Unearthly people. Nowadays there are fewer and fewer artists but more and more digital geniuses and photo manipulation masters. It is advantageous, fashionable, it is well-sold, so it is doubtlessly profitable. But no matter how old-fashioned it may sound, paintings, where each stroke is an irreversible reality, and the palette is the stage where the colors skillfully act, obediently following the artist, have their certain mystery, soul and life.

Jacob Dhein, an American impressionist painter, despite all the fashion trends, also remains faithful to the visual arts in the form it had a few centuries ago. Jacob was fond of drawing as a child: crayons and colored pencils became a great tool for the young artist’s self-expression. Not going deep into his biography, which you can read on his official website, we shall only say that until his sophomore year at the University of Art it remained an ordinary hobby for Dhein. And after he easily got the Bachelor and later a Master of Fine Arts, he continued his career not only as an artist but also a teacher at the same university. "Learn what you do not know and teach what you do", — says Jacob in one of his interviews.

Very often we make the mistake trying to achieve the maximum perfection. This so-called perfectionism often keeps us from going further, and we get stuck in our attempts to improve what we already are doing pretty well. Jacob himself has repeatedly said that if he did not proceed to the next picture until he finishes the previous one, the number of his works would hardly be more than a dozen. As long as the paintings are in my studio, I don’t know if they are ever completed until they get shipped out. They are usually at 98% finished.

Dhein also does not make a secret out of his love and admiration while working with oil paints in particular. After all, their facilities are close to absolute limitlessness: the thin layer will look like delicate watercolor, while adding some density you can get the effect of rough, textured artistic modeling. The basis for the paintings in most cases is made up of wooden panels treated with gesso.

Quite often, Jacob paints en plein air, following the example of impressionism masters, such as Pissarro, Renoir and Claude Monet. Thanks to the being outdoors during painting creation, it gets filled with light air's originality and fuzzy, blurred strokes make the image itself be of secondary importance, while they bring to the fore only sensations, emotions and ease, which are felt by the artist himself, working on a painting. Light and shade, heat and cold, wind and rain, and the most important, the the artist’s mood — that's what Jacob Dhein fills his paintings with. That's what he wants to convey to his audience.

At the moment, the practical art of painting still remains at the level of the strongest passion, since he makes a living mostly by his teaching in the University of San Francisco. But Jacob knows exactly what he wants in the future: to make art be his work, his hobby, his everything. And all it takes is "Just move forward. Just keep writing."

As usual, we share Facebook and Instagram links for you to follow this great impressionist of our times.