Oliver Jeffers: Still Life with a Choice of Beverage: A New Limited Edition Print

  • Praise Shadows is pleased to publish the third limited edition print with Oliver Jeffers. Still Life with a Choice of...
    Praise Shadows is pleased to publish the third limited edition print with Oliver Jeffers. Still Life with a Choice of Beverage is based on a 2006 painting of the same name in a private collection. It was illustrated in his 2018 monograph by Rizzoli, The Working Mind and Drawing Hand (signed copies available here). This print is available exclusively through Praise Shadows and is available to ship by late October. 
     
    Oliver Jeffers
    Still Life with a Choice of Beverage
    2024
    Archival Giclee pigment print on Hahnemuhle museum etching paper
    27.5 x 35.5 inches: image size
    31.5 x 40 inches: paper size
    Signed, numbered and embossed by the artist
    Edition of 30 plus 4 artist's proofs
    (OJ070)
  • $3,000 inclusive of S&H within the continental United States via UPS in a lined PrintPad box
    Additional fees applicable for shipping beyond the continental United States, customs, duties and taxes.
    Inquire Now
  • When I first met my now wife, she had never conversed with anyone who -- as she put it --...
     
    When I first met my now wife, she had never conversed with anyone who -- as she put it -- ‘didn’t have a proper job’. As an engineer, she was comfortable with things that fit and when questions or problems had right and wrong answers.

    How, she asked earnestly, are you supposed to grade art in third level education?

    Having never been good with numbers, I could see why people were comfortable in their graceful practicality, but it was not a method through which any sense of the world was brought to me.

    I wondered then, if here were two totally different, but equally valid, ways of understanding everything.

    Logically and emotionally.
  • This painting was one of a series of paintings I made as an attempt to explore this. The figurative paintings...
    This painting was one of a series of paintings I made as an attempt to explore this. The figurative paintings represented a classic notion of romantic emotional art, while the equations represented cold hard logic.

    In this instance, perhaps the third painting in the series, I explored the conundrum of expectation vs. reality. I once had a glass of orange and a glass of milk in front of me. I was reading at the time, therefore distracted, and picked up a glass to drink from. Expecting milk, the orange juice was bizarre in my mouth. Disgusting even. Was this reality that betrayed my expectation driven by logic? Or by emotion?

    I still don’t know. -- Oliver Jeffers, October 2024
  • Oliver Jeffers
    Photo by Marc Azoulay

    Oliver Jeffers

    Oliver Jeffers is a visual artist and author working in painting, bookmaking, illustration, collage, performance and sculpture. Curiosity, perspective, the power of storytelling, and humor are underlying themes throughout Oliver’s practice. While investigating the ways the human mind understands its world, and place within that world, his work also functions as comic relief in the face of futility. 

     

    Current directions for his art-making include the imaginary lines across land and imaginary lines in the sky. With the former, Jeffers–with a deep suspicion of Nationalism, Patriotism and Isolationism, born from growing up with the political and national uncertainty of a turbulent Belfast in the 1970s and 80s–picks apart the powerful story of human made borders, of how people treat other people. With the latter, Jeffers uses the construct of star constellations to take a longer lens approach to humanity’s story. With the egotism that was perhaps integral to the success of human civilization, Jeffers art looks at how we often forget our place in a grander cosmos- that the pictures we created for arrangements of stars in a night sky only make sense from this narrow perspective of Earth. But most importantly, given a seeming inability for people to comprehend the singularity of our Planet Earth, Jeffers tries to show, tell, and remind that this is the most urgent story humanity needs to rally around.