Initially trained in photography, Jeffrey Blondes began exploring the tradition of plein aire painting after moving to France in the late 1980s. His attraction to painting outside in all weather afforded him the opportunity to record finite temporal experiences. Today, Blondes still embraces the indeterminism and sensuality of nature. The products of his excursions into the natural world act as containers of his experience and time spent.
Jeffrey Blondes creates long-form videos, film-still editions, and drawings that illuminate the often-overlooked rhythms of the natural world. Since 1990, his practice has centered on the subtle cycles of landscapes and their relation to the passage of time. Attuned to the delicate interplay of weather, light, and planetary motion, Blondes transforms these shifts into works that invite viewers to slow down and recognize the profound significance of even the smallest changes unfolding around us each day. The shooting schedules and locations are frequently timed to record a seasonal or exceptional celestial event in a specific place. Other films are made more spontaneously over the course of a year, near his home in rural France. The films are recorded without sound. However, the mesmerizing imagery can conjure the delicate rustle of aspen leaves or hushed snowfall in the viewer’s imagination. Observing the real-time progression of Blondes’ films gives space for the viewer to connect with the slow rhythms of nature.
A practice of patient observation underpins Blondes’ work irrespective of the medium. In this spirit, he makes printed editions from his videos. These static film stills capture the flow of time within a landscape in compressed form. The framed grids of color are adapted from films Blondes feels produce an arresting network of tones. Unlike Blondes’ films, the viewer does not have to wait to observe changes in the landscape. Rather, time is presented in a coherent frame. Blondes organizes the film image extracts in a system that represents each minute horizontally by every hour vertically. At a distance, the print appears as undulating hues. Up close, each frame sharply captures the elusive changes that occur from one minute to the next. A current of time flows across the stillness of the print as the viewer’s eye moves frame to frame reading it as text, or steps back to take in the full image as one might look at color and light reflected on the water.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1956, Blondes first moved to Paris in 1981 for four years, then returned in 1988. Since 1992 his home has been in the Loire Valley. The artist’s work is collected both publicly and privately. Past exhibitions include the Centre d’Arts et de Nature, Chaumont-sur-Loire; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France; Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT; bitforms Gallery, New York, NY; David Findlay Jr. Contemporary, New York, NY; Metivier Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA; The Fine Art Society, London, and GBS Fine Art in the UK; Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Xiamen, China; among others. He has completed numerous commissioned works for public and private collections, including Wilson, WY; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; and Stanford Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Blondes’ artworks are exhibited in hospitals around the world including Memorial Sloan Kettering, New York, NY; Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, MD; and St. Thomas Hospital, London, UK.