THE OVERTURES

On Environmental Storytelling

An Interview with Jake Weiss

by Sara Mae Henke

Every month, we’re going to do an interview with our resident artist. Jake Weiss is Da Vinci Art Alliance’s resident artist for the month of May. 

“It’s significant in being inconspicuous and unnoticeable. You wouldn’t notice it until you really started looking at it. There’s a whole world of knowledge there.”

Jake Weiss is surrounded by artist community, but he does not typically draw people. Rather, he finds character in his environment.

Jake and I worked together to put on a sketch club event at Cartesian Brewing on Passyunk, a sunny afternoon in the 60s where friends came and quietly drew or chatted for a couple hours. Jake and his friend Nasir Young co-led the event, and they talked in a down-to-earth way about sources of inspiration, about adapting to their materials, sitting out on the back patio and drawing the world around them. Interviewing Jake later that week, I hear about the influences that make up his internal world, like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, Dave Mckeen’s book Cages, Philly graffiti, and his peers from his time at PAFA. You wouldn’t know it from his patient way of listening, or how he and Nasir pass jokes back and forth so easily, but Jake is a meticulously hard worker. For Corner Stories, an exhibition with friends at Da Vinci Art Alliance:

“...I made 100 different drawings, and only so many of them could be in the show. I draw every day. I’m constantly pumping things out and thinking about different angles, and I find that the more I draw a thing the more I understand. The barricades, I found the specifications on the website of the factory that produces them, the blueprints. I had the PDFs with the one to one descriptions…”

He’s talking here about the barricades that hem every construction site. You’ve probably seen them in your own walks around the city, sometimes with graffiti, which Jake talks about following different ones around the city based on their tags. He started focusing on the barricades when he realized he had been putting them into the background of his drawings repeatedly, then suddenly they became the subject of his pieces. Over time, they’ve started to evolve towards sculpture, which will be one of the focuses in his residency. He is bringing in a concrete barrier with eight layers of paint on it, with hidden messages. He wanted to use an “in-life resource” to create his own environment.

“Representing self in a physical space, and what can a barrier mean to me personally. What are the things I need to overcome as an individual, on an emotional level?”

“Representing self in a physical space, and what can a barrier mean to me personally. What are the things I need to overcome as an individual, on an emotional level? I’ve struggled with this for a long time, and even though I’m in a more stable place, there’s still barriers for me to overcome…”

Jake describes himself as a draftsman. I asked what that means to him, and he talked about focusing so much on technique at PAFA. He finds satisfaction in technical challenge, in giving himself limitations as a generative place to draw from. “There is a particular school of thought in landscape painting – that is pushing the boundaries of two point perspective. That’s one of the tools artists use to create space in their drawing. Finding something that is really challenging to draw is really exciting to me.” 

“Finding something that is really challenging to draw is really exciting to me.”

Jake grew up just outside of Philly, went to school here, and has lived between North and South while working as an emerging artist in his early career. The symbols of urban life are a motif and a North star for him, in thinking about the realities of gentrification and the working class. He is bolstered by the artists around him. He finds patterns in the everyday. “It’s significant in being inconspicuous and unnoticeable. You wouldn’t notice it until you really started looking at it. There’s a whole world of knowledge there.”

Join us for an Open Studio of Jake’s work on Sunday, May 19th from 12-2 pm at DVAA.