I am nowadays primarily a still life oil painter. As a young person I started doing graffiti and it something that has stayed with me and that I continue to do because of the sheer joy of it. My graffiti art is usually scrawling my name on something or you know I'll paint a picture of my friends. This piece came about because I was going to do a stilllife painting of Dutch Masters cigars and I purchased a Dutch Masters Bobblehead ashtray. And somehow the idea when I was looking at the ashtray of substituting Deitch for the Dutch came into my head and then I thought all wonderful then I could incorporate my figures in the composition similar to Rembrandt.The letters are a three dimensional style I developed by creating cardboard mockups and would photograph and use the flat image as reference material to create stronger affects then if it were to be out of my imagination of dimensional form.

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About Jesse Edwards

Jesse Edwards (born 1977) is a professional American fine art oil painter, graffiti artist, and ceramicist born in Hayden Lake, Idaho. He works and lives in Seattle and New York City.

Edwards, who likes to refer to his graffiti as installation art, tends toward figurative representations of celebrities, friends, and self-portraits. “I like pictures,” says Edwards, “you don't have to be graffiti-literate to read pictures."

A prolific painter, Edwards uniformly composes his work using oils on stretched linen and employs techniques such as underpainting and extensive glazing to emulate the style of the old masters. Jesse’s ceramic art has since earned him gallery representation, critical acclaim, and attention from the New York Times, among others.