Joel Sager
Collage, Tar and Oil Paintings
Columbia, Missouri
Joel Sager, a native Missourian, completed his degree in fine art at William Jewell College near
Kansas City. While there, he was selected to receive the Harriman
Fine Arts Scholarship and was a four year recipient of the Carpe
Annum award, given to the most outstanding art major. During
his senior year, the college administration purchased one of
Sager's paintings to be exhibited at the Truman Foundation headquarters
in Washington, D.C. After graduation, Sager was mentored by artist
Mark English and received a full scholarship to the Illustration
Academy at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
Upon his return from studying at the Academy, Sager began working
as an independent artist, gathering a body of work that has been
described by critics as “moody” and “smart.”
Fascinated by rural life and aspects therein, Sager presents (most often by
means of landscape, still-life, and portraiture) a dark perspective of such
imagery, juxtaposing the seemingly mundane and lifeless with subtle allegory
and vitality. Concurrent with the way some mid 20th century artists turned
to basic subject matter after the war, Sager's work serves as a redemptive
and simultaneously disquieting examination of the sometimes deep effectiveness
and other times absurdity of life. Aesthetically, the work itself reflects
the modest aspects of Sager's subject matter with its simplistic composition
and almost primitive stylization of form. With the deconstructive paint process
Sager employs, however, his work is metaphoric of the social and physical deterioration
of the literal subject matter. This process involves an underpainting of naïve
color and collage (wallpaper, construction paper, material, newspaper), a subsequent
wash with roofing tar, and a scraping on and off of oil pigment with a palette
knife. In essence, the artist is physically destroying his painting while metaphysically
embroiled in the process of decay of the literal subject matter. The result
is part realism and part primitivism: a visual struggle between idealism and
pragmatism.
Sager's paintings have had the honor of being shown nationally and internationally
from Hollywood, California to Yokohama, Japan. Sager exhibited in the Missouri
50 for outstanding Missouri artists and was featured on NPR's broadcast of
Michael Feldman's What Do You Know? . His paintings have been seen
in print at the 2006 and 2007 True/ False Film Festival, the 2004 Columbia
Festival of the Arts poster, and the seasonal 2005 Les Bourgeois Syrah label.
At 27 years of age, Sager is permanently represented, showing new bodies of
work seasonally at Perlow-Stevens Gallery in Columbia, Missouri, U.S. Joel
Sager currently resides in Columbia, Missouri, U.S. with his wife Jennifer
and son Oliver
