About the artist Jonathan Blum

I consider myself to be first and foremost a portrait painter, and my work ranges from the fanciful to the classically realistic. I can trace my painting career back to a cartoon I created for Stuff magazine in Boston in 1986. The cartoon depicted a forehead—a caricature of my own face from the eyes up. From there I started painting "forehead portraits" which captured my subjects only from the eyes up. I've left the cartoon element behind, but my focus on the top half of the face remains. My forehead portraits since then have included real people, imaginary people, historical figures (Chairman Mao and Duke Ellington, for example), dogs and cats, and, until 1998, Sesame Street's Bert. (How could I pass up such a long and pointy forehead?) I have had a number of gallery shows over the years, but I've made my living largely by selling my artwork directly to the public at outdoor markets, art fairs, and on city streets all over the world.

In 1994, I studied with an inspirational rabbi in Israel; before long, I was painting portraits of orthodox rabbis. These were a stylistic breakthrough for me. The elongated, bearded visage of this rabbi conveyed so much history and so much wisdom, I felt that I couldn't do justice to him without giving him a mouth. So with these fictitious rabbi portraits, I began to expand my cropped portraits to represent more of the face.

I am a Washington, D.C. native. I studied art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (while attending Emerson College) and at the Central Art School in London. I've had one-man shows all over the world, in Washington, D.C.; Provincetown, MA; Boston; New Orleans; London; Berlin; Tel Aviv; and Prague. I currently live, work, and sell out of a storefront space in Park Slope, Brooklyn. On weekends, I sell my work in Union Square in Manhattan (weather permitting) and at Brooklyn Flea.

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