There’s a quiet ceremony to the way in which artist and acclaimed youngsters’s guide illustrator Oliver Jeffers destroys his personal work. At every dip efficiency—the most recent held two days earlier than the October 3 opening of his solo present at Reward Shadows in Boston—a portrait is revealed, admired for all of 5 minutes, after which submerged in a vat of enamel paint till the picture disappears. The invite-only viewers watches (no footage allowed) in silence as gallons of scorching pink or electrical blue or impartial gray slide over the sitter’s face. It’s a surprisingly cheerful obliteration. Then Jeffers raises a glass of whiskey and gives his normal toast, equal components Irish wake and inside joke: “What is finished is finished, and what’s but to come back is but to come back.”
“It’s a loss of life of types,” he instructed me in his Brooklyn studio, “however it’s additionally a type of beginning, the portray isn’t full till it’s dipped.” The topic this time was the Japanese artist and up to date most cancers survivor Yuri Shimojo—“the final in a samurai bloodline,” Jeffers famous—who, after watching her likeness vanish beneath the paint, felt not grief however aid. The efficiency lasted just some minutes. Its emotional half-life will stretch for much longer.
Jeffers treats severe topics—loss of life, local weather change, violence—with greater than a soupçon of humor. His “Catastrophe Work” are proof: a red-and-white metropolis bus floats helplessly in a bucolic lake surrounded by grassy hills; fishermen scramble to douse a ship fireplace whereas, within the background, a meteor hurtles towards Earth. “It’s the top of the world,” Jeffers mentioned as we appeared on the fisherman collectively in his Brooklyn studio, “however it’s additionally simply Tuesday.”
In a single work-in-progress, leaning in opposition to a wall in his studio, considered one of his catastrophe work that made me giggle as quickly as I noticed it. “You’ll be able to take a bleak thought,” he instructed me, “and costume it in absurdity. Individuals will look longer.” He’s a Vonnegut with a paintbrush—providing laughter as an ethical stance.
The concept for the “Dipped Work” got here to Jeffers the way in which a whole lot of his concepts do—half accident, half thought experiment. “I’d been fascinated by uncertainty,” he instructed me, “the concept hidden variables—forces we are able to’t see—nonetheless form every part we do.”
In the future in 2012 he was engaged on what would turn into the primary dip portray. Distracted by the logistics of the dipping mechanism, Jeffers forgot to {photograph} it earlier than reducing it into the vat. A 12 months later he stumbled throughout a single picture of the undipped model. “I used to be shocked by how improper my reminiscence of it was,” he mentioned. “It appeared utterly completely different in my head. That was the second I noticed what the venture was actually about.” The performances began quickly after. They usually received’t be round perpetually.
Since then, each sitter has been somebody who’s stared down loss. Jeffers interviews them at size, pulling tales about mortality, probability, and alter. Throughout the efficiency the printed interview hangs about 5 ft in entrance of the portrait, accessible for studying if somebody within the viewers feels drawn to it. After the portray is dipped the interview, now on the ground, will get coated in drips and trickles of shade when the portrait is rehung above it. “It’s about how fragile reminiscence is,” he mentioned, “and the way shortly it slips away.”
His studio appears like an extension of himself: someplace between a treehouse and an Oxford professor’s examine. Almost every part is product of wooden no less than twice Oliver’s age. Vintage flat-file cupboards stack waist-high on one wall and tower eight ft on the opposite, labeled in his signature chalky, off-kilter capitals—the identical handwriting that runs throughout his youngsters’s books. Globes grasp from the ceiling and perch on high of the cupboards.
Oliver Jeffers’s studio in Brooklyn.
In a single nook sits a small white ghost from his “A Fraid of Ghosts” collection—a wide-eyed little ghoul caught in monotonous moments: ready for a telephone name, attempting to make small discuss on a four-poster mattress. “He’s fearful of being bored,” Jeffers mentioned, laughing. “A bit like me.”
After we spoke, he wore a spotless white T-shirt, French-blue chinos patched so many instances they may function a case examine in Theseus’s Paradox, and white Vans. His hair shaped a tidy James Dean swoop, tattoos flickering at his sleeves. When he talks, there’s sufficient vitality coming off his musical Irish brogue to energy two televisions and a file participant.
Yng Ru Chen, founding father of Reward Shadows, has identified Jeffers for greater than twenty years. “Once I opened the gallery, I by no means imagined representing him,” she instructed me. “He already had this large public life via his books. However for Oliver, portray has at all times been the core.”
Her gallery’s Boston handle tends to make a few of the artwork world’s extra entrenched figures flip up their noses. On the whisper of youngsters’s books and dip work they ask, “What’s his deal?” or “What’s the purpose?”—unable to fathom a multidisciplinary artist outdoors the tidy sculptor-painter-performance artist spectrum, or one who didn’t come via Yale.
Chen helped stage the Boston present and the intimate dip efficiency that preceded it. “Our aim,” she mentioned, “is to verify most people is as conscious of his fine-art observe as they’re of his image books. He’s an artist with a capital A—portray, writing, performing, storytelling—it’s all one voice.”
Her religion appears effectively positioned: your complete “Dipped Work” set up, together with the vat and efficiency remnants, was acquired by a significant collector after the Boston premiere—a primary for the collection, and can finally find yourself in a museum.
Jeffers’s story begins removed from Boston. Born in Australia in 1977 and raised in Belfast throughout the Troubles, he grew up surrounded by murals, troopers, and contradiction. “I realized to keep away from bother and discuss my approach out of it,” he instructed the Guardian in 2022. The violence left him allergic to battle; the murals left him with an unshakable sense of design. “The militant graphics of the loyalist partitions and the folksy optimism of the nationalist ones—they each discovered their approach into my work.”
He was the form of baby who’d somewhat be outdoors than studying. “I used to be way more desirous about mischief,” he instructed me, with half a smile. Nonetheless, he drew continuously, satisfied even then that he was, and would at all times be, an artist.
After finding out on the College of Ulster, he started pairing phrases and pictures—drawn to how a caption might twist which means. That easy thought would outline every part he made after.
The primary outcome was The way to Catch a Star, an art-school venture printed in 2004 to prompt acclaim. Misplaced and Discovered adopted two years later, incomes him the Nestlé Smarties E-book Prize. Since then his image books—The Coronary heart within the Bottle, The Day the Crayons Give up, Right here We Are—have offered practically fifteen million copies in forty-nine languages. “The children’ books got here as an accident,” he mentioned. “They had been made to fulfill my curiosity. It was luck that youngsters preferred them.”
Jeffers way back stopped worrying concerning the divide between positive artwork and kids’s books. “I used to care,” he mentioned. “Then I ended.” The handwriting that loops throughout his canvases reappears in his image books, and the identical curiosity drives each. His Brooklyn studio, with its ghosts, globes, and patched trousers, proves that whimsy and rigor can coexist.
Set up shot of Oliver Jeffers Dipped Work at Reward Shadows.
Dan Watkins
A lot of his work flirts with the exhausting sciences, arithmetic, cosmology. In In the meantime Again on Earth—a type of illustrated peace manifesto—a father drives his youngsters via the photo voltaic system to indicate them how petty human battle appears to be like from area. “Perspective can come from time or distance,” Jeffers writes. “If you take a deep breath, you settle down as a result of that provides you the attitude of time. If you get far sufficient away, the battle doesn’t appear so essential anymore.”
He’s turned that philosophy into an inventive through-line: a perception that humor, perspective, and empathy are the one actual antidotes to disaster.
That concept discovered an ideal house in 2022, when the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum invited Jeffers to create its Anne H. Fitzpatrick façade. Throughout his residency he painted Universes: a girl studying by lamplight whereas, above her, a deep-blue cosmos unfolds into constellations and comets. It was traditional Jeffers—home intimacy set in opposition to infinite area. “He’s at all times enjoying between the cosmic and the on a regular basis,” Chen mentioned. “It’s his candy spot.”
The venture coincided along with his first Reward Shadows solo, a touch of the artistic momentum that might crest in 2025. Between the Gardner façade, the brand new “Dipped Work” exhibition, and a brand new Brooklyn Museum collaboration, Jeffers had quietly orchestrated his personal small universe—every venture orbiting the identical questions of reminiscence, time, and perspective.
On the Brooklyn Museum, Life at Sea expands that orbit. The set up, designed by the museum’s contemporary-art and training departments, invitations guests to construct their very own floating worlds. “There’s an actual generosity in Oliver’s work,” mentioned Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s deputy director. “He connects folks to complicated concepts in very accessible methods.”
The room glows with smooth blues and greens; fashions of imaginary boats drifted in shallow swimming pools. “It’s about care,” he mentioned. “We’re all at sea, attempting to navigate.” Then, smiling, he added, “Solely distinction is a few of us have GPS.” The interns laughed, and so did he.
Atkins referred to as the present a full-circle second. 13 years earlier, Jeffers’s first dipped portray—With out a Doubt Pt. 2—had hung within the museum’s community-curated exhibition Go. Now he was again, his observe expanded to fill a division of its personal.
Oliver Jeffers’s latest guide, “I’m Very Busy.”
His latest image guide, I’m Very Busy was launched on October 7. It follows a woman who discovers that friendship issues greater than productiveness. “It’s a humorous little fable,” he mentioned. “But it surely’s additionally about slowing down—one thing I’m nonetheless attempting to study.” On October 14 Jeffers hit late evening with an look on Jimmy Kimmel Stay! to speak about his new guide—a uncommon mainstream highlight for an artist who nonetheless talks about reminiscence like a physicist and loss like a comic.
That pressure between absurdity and permanence runs via every part Jeffers makes. “All artwork is about time,” he instructed me as we packed as much as depart his studio. “Some folks attempt to freeze it. I prefer to acknowledge it.” The “Dipped Work” will conclude in 2027 on the Ulster Museum in Belfast—the town the place he grew up and, throughout the pandemic, returned to stay. He’s received the ultimate topic in thoughts already, however wouldn’t share who it might be, a humorous little efficiency in itself.
“I knew from the beginning he’d be the final one,” Jeffers mentioned. “It felt proper—this individual’s seen extra endings than anybody I do know.”
Till then, he’ll maintain shifting—between Brooklyn and Belfast, between picture-book worlds and vats of enamel, between disaster and punchline. In his studio, a porcelain rocket bobs in a sea of blue like a rubber duck that took a improper flip. It’s humorous and a bit heartbreaking, which is exactly the purpose. Jeffers doesn’t paint to protect the world; he paints to remind us how ridiculous it’s that we ever thought we might.
