Jonah Osti

My art is meant as a meditation on life as a mythical story. In my work lies a journey through the underworld in which the hero must confront the mortality and evil embedded in reality. The hero is a personification of my own fears and flaws, but in this voyage, he must choose to face the shadow of the world by facing his own. In doing so, he is reborn and transforms that darkness into new life where beauty and truth flourish. I sought to situate this story in the context of dreams—an environment in which I find the merging of my own life and experiences with that of the symbolic world embedded in the subconscious. I based the premise of the symbolic world on the works of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

The journey through the underworld and beyond, as I have represented in this series of oil paintings, is steeped in my family’s history, faith, military service, intimate knowledge of mythical stories, and my personal experiences of pain, heartbreak, joy, and beauty. My paint strokes are frenetic, emotional, and obsessive. Colors become dynamic in surreal and dreamlike compositions. Further enhancing the surreal is the use of animals, nature, and quotations of older works of art. I draw on ancient iconography from across cultures to convey the aged nature of this story and merge it with contemporary imagery to mark the paintings as distinctly modern. In both the narrative of the pieces as well as the processes of constructing them, I hoped to have embarked on an exploration that discovers hope through despair, heroism in the face of darkness, and joy in spite of fear.