Jerome Carlin (1927-2014)
“My enterprise has to do with finding a way to marry the expressive quality of paint itself with some strongly felt emotion and to find subject matter that moves me sufficiently to make me want to do it. And that has been my preoccupation for a long time.” - Jerome Carlin
Jerome Carlin (1927-2014) was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Carlin's father, a lawyer, greatly influenced his professional and artistic endeavors throughout his life. He graduated from Harvard University and received graduate degrees in Sociology from the University of Chicago and a LL.B from Yale Law School. In 1963 he moved to Berkeley to teach and conduct research at the University of California, Center for the Study of Law and Society. In the late 1960's at the height of President Johnson's War on Poverty, he established and became Director of the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation which provided free legal services to low income and the poor residents of San Francisco. In 1970 he decided to leave this administrative post and turned to painting full time. He was a member of The Berkeley Artists Breakfast Club which included (among others) Elmer Bischoff, Sidney Gordin, Erle Loran, Charles Strong, Peter Shoemaker, Philip Morsberger, Matt Phillips, Terry St. John, Joseph Slusky, and Arthur Monroe.
He continued to be socially active in opposing the War in Vietnam and Iraq War while helping to create the Bay Area Artists for Nuclear Sanity and the Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts now called the California Lawyers for the Arts. During the last Forty years of his life he continued to paint full time with his work represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Oakland Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The autobiographical paintings explore a particular American time and place using photographs and the filter of memory.
“The paintings focus on the experience of growing up in Chicago in an upper middle class Jewish milieu of the thirties and forties,” said Carlin. “They describe interior domestic scenes, large family gatherings and celebrations, vacations in Miami Beach and the Caribbean, and scenes in Chicago restaurants and clubs. Although these canvasses are based on black and white photographic images, I meant to capture more than a mere likeness. I intended to convey what it felt like to be present at that particular moment in time and place through a spontaneous response to the subject matter in the visual language of color, gesture and form.”
Artist Statement
“I was inspired by the late 19th and early 20th century painters whose work I so frequently encountered in my visits as a child to The Art Institute of Chicago. I was drawn to the richly subjective realism of such diverse artistic sensibilities as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Vuillard, Bonnard, Matisse, Hopper and Eakens. I also felt a strong connection with the Bay Area Figure Painters, Park, Diebenkorn and Bischoff.”