“I use my dyslexia as a form of artwork. When I create a composition of a piece, usually there’s another piece upside-down.” — Jarrett Camp
Jarrett Camp is an award-winning fine artist based in Los Angeles. He is a stipple artist who creates large works that may take months to complete. He has been chosen to be a contributing artist to the NBA’s In the Paint program and he is represented by the Band of Vices art gallery.
Jarrett’s work, Comatose (below) is work where he tried to present “right” and “left” brain related differences.
Jarrett: ” This piece, actually upside down is another piece which tells the same story….how sleep works from the left brain and the right brain.
The left brain is more, reading, math, and science. But the right brain is more artsy and music. If you look more into it, you’ll see there’s more objects and flowers that that are actually used for sleep…that’s how I use my dyslexia to create work.
About his dyslexia, Jarrett says this:
“Throughout my entire… kindergarten all the way up to to 12th grade, I didn’t even know I had dyslexia. I didn’t know what dyslexia was, until two weeks out of high school with my own art teacher. She’s the one who told me, not my math teacher, not my English teacher, none of my teachers told me about this issue at all, wow. Until two weeks out of high school. So that means all the times I’ve been made fun of bullied, etc, etc. Never getting a good grade, never getting above a C in English or math. Didn’t even know it.”
Today Jarrett, tells me that he still struggles with reading, but his wife has been very supportive and helps him when he encounters text he can’t understand.
I asked him about the faint yellow in the flower on the left, and he said it was meant be like the large letter in the old English books (like “Once upon a time.” The color draws your eye in the painting, then it leads you to the rest of the world. He also added the flowers he chose for this painting were jasmine flowers because of their association with sleep. The presence of rocks and minerals in the piece help represent the construction of thought.
The work above is titled Time.
Jarrett told me that all of his works start with research, deep thinking about his subject, and decisions to choose objects that represent his ideas in his work. His artwork belongs to the surrealism movement, a movement that began in the 1990s that sought to allow the subconscious mind reveal itself.
Sleep and daydreaming play important parts in the generation of his work:
“In my sleep, I can look at the picture and formulate it, close my eyes, think about it…my drawing its in my head.”
At the end of our discussion, Jarrett said, “Artists are very important to society… please support artists and let them feel like they’re valuable to society…we put our heart and soul into it.”
To see more of Jarrett’s website, visit: https://www.jarretttcamp.com/
