Jeffrey Pitt
Born 1972 in Wichita, Kansas, Jeffrey Pitt always loved to travel and experience other cultures, places, and to observe what made them unique. It was this interest that eventually brought him to New Orleans to attend Tulane University. Graduating with a B.A. in Anthropology, he realized that what truly fascinated him about cultures was their artistic expressions and how those expressions related to their environments, beliefs, religions, and means of subsistence. With a minor in Studio Art and a childhood joy of drawing and painting, he decided to make art and cultural observation a career. He attended the University College of London’s Slade school of Fine Art’s “Alternative Foundation” where his drawings and paintings of iconography and symbols were transformed into a style of interpreting current events and situations in his own world.
This wanting to interpret culture based on artistic and ceremonial expression has led Pitt to develop a lexicon of his own symbols which can be applied to current situations and arranged in paintings such that the viewer can find symbols and icons buried on top of and over images. The more one engages the paintings the more images that will appear. In many pieces of Pitt's work, a single line threads it’s way through the image creating a context or world layered with symbols, people, animals, or ideas. While the pieces appear very complex the symbols themselves are very simple, a method the artist observed from tribal cultures around the world.
Pitt's work can be found in the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Wichita Center for the Arts, and in many notable private collections in New Orleans and the United States.