Artworks
Jake Townsend trained in the visual arts and architecture as undergraduate at UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture during the early 1990's; a period that produced a generation of successful visual artists who together studied with the leading figures of their era. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree, and having concentrated in painting and the application of mechanics, computer control and engineering in contemporary painting and sculpture, Jake went on to a successful career in another field. He has shown his work periodically, and most recently saw the publication of his book, "Wisdom from the Waters" (Andrews McMeel, 2017) that he both wrote and illustrated with his contemporary watercolors. The book was a bestselling title in its category. His contemporary approach to watercolor is the result of his decades- long examination of painting and its relationship to contemporary sculpture, semiotics and systems theory. In the same way that engineered sculptural objects can be approached as a mechanical engineer may approach the design and construction of machines and objects, so too can a painting find its form. His watercolors, which employ both the traditional watercolor techiques and paints as well as the sparing use of graphite, acrylics and other synthetic pigments, can be viewed as schematics to other iterations of these foundational concepts. Like seeds to a field of crop plants, these "maps", as rendered in the so-called traditional mediums, are meant as both singular artworks and as plans for future paintings and objects that may or may not be realized in other, different, forms. His recent works are represented below.
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