From the press release for the July, 1999 exhibit at the Martin Luther King Memorial Library, Washington, DC
Peter Michael Dufore entered the world of jazz at an early age. At age fifteen, he played trumpet and french horn, and formed and led the amateur jazz groups: The Artistic Jazz Quintet and The Copasetics. He received a creative arts education at the High School of Art and Design in New York City and his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Communications from the School of Visual Arts in the same city. DuFore is regarded as an abstract expressionist with a passion for cubism and sometimes surrealistic moods. About his creative process, DuFore says, "Expressions and images travel from the storms of my soul to my mind's eye from the winds of Latin (salsa), jazz, classical, blues or rock. The colors are emotions of streams that flow into the aesthetic windows' scapes from the panes of my subconscious reflections."
A native of South Africa, Neil Joffe studied art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation under Bill Ainsly in 1980. He obtained a national diploma in fine art from the Witwatersrand Technikon. Joffe has exhibited in various galleries in Johannesburg and has done commissioned works. The motifs in his paintings--great birds, bull men, and ancestral spirits--celebrate and guide his African dream and the victory of retaining his African identity.
As a vocal advocate for the arts, Bill Warrell has been active in the national cultural community since 1978. He obtained a Bachelor in Fine Arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1975, and for several years he explored painting, printmaking, performance art, video and audio recording. Through the years he has developed a series of very personal portraits of musical artists who were to influence him as an artist, a producer, and a person. Warrell is the executive director of District Curators, Inc. in Washington, DC. He is currently involved in producing for stage, radio, and television.
In the early 1970s, Michael Wilderman combined his appreciation of jazz and photography and began documenting jazz performances. His first published photo was in Down Beat magazine in 1974. He moved to the DC area in 1977 and began to work closely with JazzTimes magazine. Since then, his pictures have also been published regularly in various jazz magazines, journals, newspapers, jazz books, and on compact discs. Wilderman views the creative developments of jazz as a photojournalist and uses his sensitivity to the music and musicians to capture the character of the artists in performance portraits. "Music is a celebration of life that has frequently been celebrated itself through the visual arts," says Wilderman. He has recently been working with computer graphics, creating designs with montages of his photographs. His photos can be seen at his website: http://www.kreative.net/jazzvisions/
This exhibit provides a visual manifestation of the influence of music. Peter Michael DuFore's representational musical paintings and drawings are cast within a dream-like dimension of sound and energy. The abstract paintings of Neil Joffe are stimulated by musical performances and reflect the rhythm and vitality of the South African music of their inspiration. Bill Warrell's painted jazz portraits combine realism with symbolism to describe Warrell's relationship to the artists and their music. Michael Wilderman's jazz photographs present literal impressions of the music providing deja vu images for those who have been enthralled in any audience.
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