Jerome Marshak never imagined his work would end up being showcased in New York city. But one week ago he got a call from the curator of the Drawing Center, Nina Katchadourian, who told him that she wanted to feature his work in a show on January 14, 2010, and she asked him to send her his portfolio.

“I am going to New York on the first of November to look at the space and discuss framing. Then I am going in January for the show,” Marshak said, sounding faintly shocked. “We’re turning the event into a family reunion.”

Marshak has been fascinated with color and light for a long time. His mother enrolled him in an art museum program when he was 7. A teacher gave each student different types of media and took the children around the St. Louis Art Museum to draw.

“I remember that there was one large gallery dedicated to post-modernist work. Picasso, Monet, Suerrat, etc. I had an epiphany. I just loved all the colors. For years I was fascinated with color. When I draw, I am on. I am fully present, and fully content,” Marshak said.

Jerome Marshak was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1942. His journey as an artist began in 1965 while he was studying law at Washington University in St. Louis. Near the end of his graduate work, he realized that art, not law, would be his life’s work.

Marshak is an abstract artist, and seeks to express what he has no words for. His work is untitled. In the late sixties and early seventies he exhibited his work at the Los Angeles Artist’s Association and the Comsky Gallery. During this period he was associated with a group of Los Angeles high-tech minimalists. Those artists were instrumental in the formation of Marshak’s aesthetic as an abstract artist.

Since 1981, he has made his home on Lopez Island. He has worked continually as an artist but has had little contact with the world of art. For the past five years, he’s had the use of a remote studio on the southern headlands of Lopez Island. These recent drawings are the result of his time spent studying the light and lines of the marine landscape there.

“I work in a non-rational state of being,” Marshak commented. “I seek balanced, aesthetic equations, visual resolution.”