Widely acclaimed for his elegant systems-based art, William Martin Jean creates paintings that combine rational, intellectual experience with personal, intuited feeling. During his early years, Jean created improvisatory paintings with rich impasto surfaces. In the early 1970s he began seeking more control over the creative process and developed a personal language of ordered structure, often basing his compositions on a predetermined mathematical grid. The new structures were inspired partly by Pre-Columbian pyramids that Jean encountered in Mexico. For the past two decades, architecture has remained a dominant concern of Jean’s art. More recently, Jean has also been creating small collage paintings, often by gluing and sewing materials on paper.
