Jason Osborne
Souvenir Optimism

Call Jason E. Osborne a modern renaissance man, a bohemian genius, a poet laureate, or 30th century artist-man and none of it will stick, nothing comes close-let's go instead with a master of all trades, a jack of none. Jason E. Osborne is a truly genuine individual whose well-calloused work ethic, distinctive capacity for creation, and cadre of real life experience make him at once equally unique.

To wit... Jason left a single sock on my car's radio antenna with his initials J.E.O. scrawled in big Sharpie in the year 2000 only to say a quiet goodbye. This is after he had given me a step-fathers Harley Davidson shirt off his back the night before as a parting gift when I was out of T-shirts and our paths would split in early before I was awake morning, with him headed home south to North Carolina at a loping 50 miles an hour... I can only guess that he drives so slowly down that highway to close intimately in on the nicer details of the journey.

This slow-driving philosophy is not much unlike Osborne's paintings that sit cramped on the thinning line between controversy and sad whimsy out on a Sunday drive with an enduring sense of humor. Jason Osborne flirts with the typology of the mundane, poking fun and connecting otherwise disparate everyday symbols to suggest, question, and emote sardonic cheer in us all. The quality of paint, the color work and sensitive gesture in his paintings might categorize him less a painter of light and more a definitive artist with his work looking like it belongs idea still-life on the studio wall.

When confronted about the unfinished nature of his work Osborne replies "They [the paintings] go through a lot of change. Part of the unfinished-ness is the old part of the painting coming through while I work to figure the painting out. ...They are about leaving behind the remnant of the person who made them, if they looked polished then I would be doing something wrong." So close to the elongated fuzzy moments between sleep and sober waking, Jason E. Osborne's work reflects the innate tension between choosing the right and the wrong decision while we are still here to make them.

Jesus is said to have been a carpenter and a preacher of God's word and J.E.O. is a carpenter and informant on the grayer areas of this modern life whose paintings each invite a great long unbuckled digestion. When approached about the "what" of his painting, Osborne offers, "It is not so much about what it comes from, but where it comes from. It comes from going to work eight hours a day and coming home and making a painting. I like to categorize it as sarcastic optimism."

Once wanted by the law in North Carolina for sticking population awareness stickers and likely on multiple terrorism and anti-terrorism lists for innocently making a Super-8 film too close to a notorious power plant while in possession of a beard, Osborne's curiosity and slyly outspoken nature have recently gotten him in some pretty warm waters in America.

Jason E. Osborne had to skip the country afresh to shake it all off and happened to walk around half of Northern Spain on a leg of the El Camino De Santiago pilgrimage to take it all in. At the finish of this pilgrimage he was reported to find "...the end is the beginning." Osborne is now holed-up in a new warm embrace of home Durham, where he will spend his time "investigating the differences between souvenir optimism that we all feel sometimes versus melancholy you know you shouldn't." He is at this moment simultaneously loving, working and skateboarding while painting and drawing and imagining like a crank.

Credits
 

Paintings
Jason E. Osborne

Introduction
Seth Butler

J.E.O Potrait
Leonard R. Greco

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