Today we’d like to introduce you to Jedidiah Dore.
Jedidiah, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I grew up by NASA Ames in Moffett Field Naval Air Station in California. When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut, drawing all the different spacecraft I imagined I would pilot on wondrous missions. That’s pretty much how I started learning to draw. I moved to NYC to study painting and illustration at Pratt Institute, spending most of my life living in Brooklyn and NYC and then on to Texas. Inspired by my love for science and space exploration, I began an ongoing art project called Stellar Science Series with much of initial ideas and concepts sketched on location. I am an artist specializing in reportage and on-site documentary drawing. Reportage art is a proactive and dedicated process of creating a visual essay through documentary drawing. The project has taken me on great adventures to places such as Mars Yard for Curiosity Rover, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Deep Space Network, Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center and opportunities to create space art for Jacob Technologies, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, and exhibit my art at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Today finds me continuing my explorations in reportage art and painting, enjoying my work as a full-time Visual Arts Teacher, training as an amateur Muay Thai fighter, and striving onward with the same curiosity and wonder I had as a boy piloting spacecraft to the unknown.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I gravitate to capturing motion and action, fl‑ow of people, and activity in rural and urban settings in a dynamic way. My reportage art is a proactive and dedicated process of creating a visual essay through documentary drawings typically accomplished on location. Every situation or place I reportage has a unique kind of energy and culture, color, sight, and sound. Before I decide on a location, I study its historical/cultural past and consider its present and future. So much activity happens in the duration of my drawing, there’s little occasion to think about what to describe; rather with synchronized energy and gestures of quick application of ink, line, and marks, I desire to capture both the feeling of and movement over, under and through that time and space. I emphasize special qualities of verticality, dimension, and scale to evoke the advance of time and passages through.
The purpose of my drawing becomes transitory in nature, expressing the beauty of culture that exists not only in surfaces of great architecture and urban landscape but also in the conscious transformation and energy of people moving through these spaces along with my own connection in capturing them.
Artists face many challenges, but what do you feel is the most pressing among them?
The biggest challenge for artists today is being able to carve out a career as an artist. Being a fulltime artist requires perseverance, patience, and a lot of grit. The art world, art & design culture, and our continuing evolution in design communication and aesthetics make it quite challenging for any visual communicator today. If you’re an artist thinking about giving up, please don’t. Continue to work, play, experiment, and share the value of art.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
My work can be seen in selected publications and reviews such as:
“Reportage drawing: Visual Journalism” a reportage drawing book published by Bloomsbury Publishing UK, “Pen and Ink”, a book featuring my reportage drawings, published by Frances Lincoln UK (available worldwide), and art features in art net, NASA, The Daily Texan, Austin Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, British GQ, Wired, Radio Lab, and PBS. You can also see my art via social network @jedidore, on my art & design studio at inkandsword.com, and new website jedidore.com.
Contact Info:
- Website: inkandsword.com
- Email: hello@inkandsword.com
- Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/jedidore
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/inkandsword
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/inkandsword
- Other: jedidore.com
Image Credit:
Images and artwork by Jedidiah Dore. Photo of Jedidiah Dore (Houston Space Center) by Hayley Gillespie.
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