Jeremy Deprez

“A couple years back I used to frequent this Starbucks near the job I was working at. One day I happened to notice some business type wearing a button up dress shirt that had a two-color vertical line pattern that wrinkled, vibrated and undulated all at once, constantly changing as it moved. I immediately started to think of my Dad (a traveling family portrait salesman) as someone who would wear this kind of shirt and as time went on I started to notice the pattern more and more. At some point out of formal necessity I actually bought a shirt with the same pattern as the one that had become so visible. When I got it home I quickly realized it not only didn’t really fit—the sleeves were too short, it was boxy and over all ill fitting—but it wasn’t something I was interested in wearing, so I took it off and tossed it on the floor.

While digging through laundry some time after, the shirt reappeared and I started thinking about its physical properties and the collected associations I had developed in relation to it. I ended up taking a bunch of images of the shirt and using them as the framework for a few paintings. I didn’t just want to put uniform lines next to each other and let them interact, but to try and paint the effect that the shirt created when looked at. I wanted to see what attempting to do this would create and if I could somehow visually capture the varied levels of meaningful authority this shirt had stressed to me. I made a few paintings but they all fell a little short of what I was looking for; so after some time away from working with it, I decided I would try again. I made the painting much bigger and more complicated, both visually and structurally, than earlier iterations with the hope that it would impose itself onto the viewer like the shirt had impressed itself onto me. I ended up titling the painting ‘Chuck,’ after my Dad.”

-Jeremy DePrez

Jeremy DePrez (b.1983 in Portland, Maine) lives and works in Houston, TX.