Naylor and Warren of Girl Sees Art on opening night.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\u2018Reading Between The Lines\u2019 deconstructed Naylor\u2019s established practice, delineating the pieces to craft a subconscious study in cognition. \u201cThe first painting was still pretty literal,\u201d Naylor said. \u201cI just turned it into a triptych where it’s cut into three pieces.\u201d Continuing through the exhibition, however, led viewers to contemplate isolated and abstracted bits of letters, gestures popping against black backgrounds. A palpable awareness about the visceral process of perception rushed to fill the space between the viewers\u2019 eyeballs and Naylor\u2019s artwork, mounted on white warehouse walls of well-worn brick and industrial wiring.
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Naylor told me that since the pandemic, \u201cWe\u2019ve been craving this connection, but we just can’t quite have it.\u201d As viewers encountered the sensation of just barely catching words and letters in Naylor\u2019s paintings, the work shed light on the process of building more effectively than words might have managed.
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Just like the viewer can\u2019t completely wrangle Naylor\u2019s canvases into submission, the creative drive and those circumstances always influencing it are beyond the scope of human reach. Instead, as Naylor has found at almost every stage in his development, an individual can only alter their relationship to these external forces.
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While the past year has proven a challenge on the collective scale, opportunities continually abound. Naylor has channeled the strife into big projects that still fit a quarantine state of mind\u2014large-scale murals in Massachusetts and Connecticut, a stenciled street art campaign reminding New Yorkers to wash their hands and keep their heads up, and the publication of his first book, \u2018Live Life Colorfully,\u2019 which offers concrete tips to find inspiration in the otherwise mundane.
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By the time it closed, \u2018Read Between the Lines\u2019 sold all but few pieces of its inventory, donated its largest canvas to a mental health nonprofit in Bucks County, PA, and hosted a book signing for fans who acquired Naylor\u2019s literary endeavor. By working with the pieces within his reach, the artist generated beauty and activity where there had only once been blank space.
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Poetry was never a luxury, but a reality always within reach. This truth propels Jason Naylor in his evangelism of spellbinding shades and seasoned finesse. The message stays the same, but its shape vacillates at whim. From street corners to soda cans, luxury handbags, and now the white-walled gallery space, for Naylor it\u2019s all part of the process of exposing the poetry innate to every moment. All it takes is the love, time, and space required to read between the lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Poetry was never a luxury\u2014the creative impulse is more demand than request. Brooklyn-based artist, designer, and creative director Jason Naylor has constructed monuments most spend their careers chasing\u2014murals at international festivals, brand partnerships that mass-produce his message, even a permanent billboard in Times Square. These achievements haven\u2019t sprung from the ether by fate. They are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":37952,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,21],"tags":[387,390,386,388,231],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}