Jesse Ozar — Studio / Los Angeles

Jesse Ozar is a Los Angeles–based painter and designer working primarily in oil.

His paintings begin with a search for tension: beauty against decay, control against disruption, the organic against the constructed. The finished work is often quiet at first glance, but that quiet is rarely complete. Forms dissolve, collide, bloom, fracture, or disappear into one another.

Ozar has spent more than two decades painting, drawing, building images, and studying how light, material, and form change the way an image is felt. His process moves between physical and digital tools, but the final paintings are made slowly by hand.

The work is not intended to explain a single idea. It is a place for opposing things to exist at the same time.

I have always been interested in the point where something beautiful starts to become unstable.

I build the work slowly. Sometimes a painting takes months. Sometimes years. The process involves a lot of editing, rebuilding, covering things up, and starting parts again. I am less interested in preserving the first idea than I am in following the painting until it feels resolved.

Outside the studio I am a designer, builder, husband, and father. Those parts of my life inevitably enter the work, even when they are never illustrated directly.