Jarvis Wilcox fell into painting in a serendipitous way.

An art history student at Columbia some years back, he was accosted by a fellow on the street.

”He wanted me to be a model in his art class,” he says.

“I told him I wasn’t broke and I wasn’t a narcissist.”

But Arthur Stern persisted.  And Jarvis Wilcox enrolled in his class.

“I learned more in three hours than I’d learned cumulatively up until then,” he says.  “He said to hang your mind up at the door and pay attention to what you see.”

The Columbia student virtually dropped out of college and basically moved into his instructor’s studio. 

Otherwise, he realized, he’d wind up “fat, fifty and frustrated.”

By 1973, he’d moved with his wife to a farm near Ithaca, N.Y. and was featured in his first one-man show.  And he hasn’t looked back since.

He says his work picks up where the Post-Impressionists left off.  He believes paintings are made up of a series of colors juxtaposed next to one another, rather than lines or borders.

“What’s left out is more important than what’s included,” he says.  “I want to design an experience for someone else to go through that’s similar to what I did in painting – to talk about what something resembles, rather than what it represents.

And every day is a new opportunity.

“It’s about whatever says ‘Hello’ in the morning,” he says.

Indeed.

For more on Jarvis Wilcox and his show at the Southport Galleries in Southport, Conn., go to http://southportgalleries.com/artists/jarvis-wilcox/

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