"Improvisations: Blues and Jazz Visions" Paintings by Joe Roache at Jefferson Arts Gallery

Jefferson Arts Gallery invites you to “Improvisations: Blues and Jazz Visions” Paintings by Joe Roache that evoke the sultry heat of the music that was born in the South. Opening Saturday February 10 and continuing through March 2.

The paintings in this show are from a series of paintings that explore Jazz and Blues music creators and developers. In this series I am depicting images of the people and places that were instrumental in creating and developing one of the original American art forms. Blues and Jazz were created by people who had very little financially but were spiritually rich. These paintings show houses or shacks as a basic symbol that carries throughout the series. These houses give the work a pictorial and stylistic continuity that helps to center the theme. The theme is about the creation of art in a hostile environment.

My paintings try to depict what the great jazz musician Archie Shepp said when he stated: “{Where is that driving music man, where is that driving music man, who use to wail our backs. Never knew where he came from, it could have been a castle or a shack. He had a priceless song to sang, his music tells you where it’s at.”

Dreams are the doors to our unconscious, understand them and understand ourselves. The house is our little kingdom in which we shelter from the world. The symbol of the house that I use helps to give the work a basic continuity that helps the viewer to have a place to begin.