Jami Tobey’s work reveals a fascination with the natural world where sweeping brush strokes and both swaths of color create tension, expectation, and emotions that quicken the heart. From bewitching trees to swirling clouds to mystical landscapes, the subjects of Jami’s paintings reflect a world that can be achingly beautiful, inspiring, contemplative, sometimes frightening, but always alive and breathing.
Born in 1974 in Oregon, Jami was destined to become an artist. At the age of five, Jami’s father, the prominent sculptor, Gene Tobey, invited her into his studio and exposed her to a spectrum of styles, subjects, and techniques, and encouraged her to follow her own path of artistic expression.
Jami was formally educated at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, where she sharpened her craft, mastered the use of composition, and injected intense colors and acrylic ink into her paintings to bring them to life with a stained-glass glow. By the time she was 14, she had sold her first piece at a Santa Fe art auction, and by 28, her work was featured in nationally acclaimed galleries.
A member of the prestigious National Oil and Acrylic Society and the La Jolla Art Association, Jami’s work is featured in some of the finest galleries in the United States and commissioned for private collectors worldwide. She works out of her home studio in California, where she lives with her husband and two children.
Working under a thunderstorm, bending in the wind, blinded by afternoon sparks on the flowing water, I have always had a strong connection, almost a love affair, with the natural world. My work is a celebration of that love, a glimpse into the purity of nature, and, perhaps, a vehicle to reconnect others – including myself – with the places we once cherished, lost somewhere, and traded away for the cares of the modern world with its cubicles, long commutes, glowing computer screens, and our safe lives inside the suburbs.
It’s time to escape.
My work invites us to return to that same fascination we experienced as children when we ventured deeper into the woods, set fire to the fog, camped under a blanket of stars, married strange sounds and smells, heard the lonely bugle of the elk, fished with our fathers, and studied the endless relationship of branches, twigs, and leaves, and danced to the rhythm of the seasons.
Nature wears many faces: it can be achingly beautiful, wild, comic, sometimes frightening, but always alive and breathing.
With some imagination, and perhaps a little luck, my paintings will recall that sort of magic that nature once provided us in generous amounts. And the acrylic, stained-glass appearance that threads through the work might suggest an almost religious devotion to the subject matter that enables us to remember what we’ve lost along the way, to step outside, and breathe for the first time in years.
