Bio:
Jason Sobottka is a professional artist and art educator, born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. He earned his AA degree in fine and graphic arts from Grays Harbor College and continued on to earn his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Montana, where he focused on printmaking and painting. Sobottka earned his M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Jason exhibits his paintings, drawings, and prints across the nation and his work is featured in many public and private collections. He has worked at Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma Community College and Green River College. He currently is the Department Chair of Humanities and Visual Art at Lake Washington Institute of Technology in Kirkland, WA. He is the faculty advisor for LWTECH’s Design AAS-T in Illustration and is developing a Bachelor of Science in Applied Art-Illustration degree.
Artist Statement:
This is not my typical artist statement, but the past year and a half of our shared pandemic has also not typical. I have seen many artists, designers, musicians, and other creatives thrive with the “found time” that lockdowns, remote work and an otherwise upset routine provided.
I regret that I do not remember the exact quote, or the author of one meaningful social media post, but it perfectly encapsulated what I needed to hear: That in this troubling time, I did not NEED to be an artist. I did not need to produce. It was okay to not paint, pause the portfolio, and focus on another urgency. The disruption to health, the uncertainty of a deadly pathogen, and the overwhelming politicization of the pandemic all provide enough to deal with, and that if somebody (such as myself) did not find inspiration, then that was completely understandable.
My Symbiotic Mutualism and Adventures Through the Anthropocene work from the past decade ground to a halt. I toiled with maybe three paintings that were finished but put aside. It would be an easy trap to say that I wasn’t producing during COVID, but in reality, something quiet and new emerged.
During the pandemic I continued teaching college art classes and advising Illustration students. During my coursework I reinventing printmaking for the home studio, and taught anatomy to life drawers with remote models on ZOOM. The pandemic had opened up a sense of research, experiment, and even play.
I returned to my roots in figuration, portraiture, and drawing. I also experimented with printmaking media that I had not pursued in decades, and experimented with multi-plate collagraph printing. This work didn’t feel like my work” and when I would tell people that I was not making art, I would later be surprised how many new works were hanging in my studio. This pandemic experimentation has opened several new doors, including a return to printmaking, a new non-objective series of work, and the portraits seen here in the 2021 Southwest Washington Juried Exhibition. Another interesting development is my return to my found-object topographical map series called Topography, which is returning from a ten-year hiatus.