Kevin Jacobs
Artist Bio
Kevin Jacobs was born in North Hollywood, CA, in 1964. Kevin is primarily a self-taught fine artist and graphic designer. Kevin had minimal formal training even though he attended Los Angeles Valley College and Otis Parsons School of Design in the late 1980s.
While in college, he was introduced to the medium of printmaking, where he created etchings and many monotypes.
Kevin would later work as a printmaker assistant at a fine arts printmaking studio in North Hollywood, CA. That's where he honed his printmaking skills and expressive atmospheric monotypes.
It's his experience with early printmaking that has refined his present style of artwork today.
Graphic Designer
Owner of Firestarter Graphic with 20+ years experience in print graphics—concise and ​relevant designs with flare.
In the late 1990s, Kevin became a commercial graphic designer and an art director in the remote control hobby industry. Later, he established his graphic design studio, Firestarter Graphics. This new discipline as a graphic designer refined Kevin's fine art even further with his dynamic compositions, detailed line work, bold shapes, and unique expressive style. Kevin's present work is a diverse selection of mediums such as painting, drawings, relief sculptural paintings, dioramas, collages, and assemblages. Kevin's work is exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and has been featured in several art publications and journals. Kevin resides in Southern California with his wife, Skie, and dog, Billie.
"working out the kinks from womb to tomb"
"Certainly I'm often sad and my melancholy is reflected in my pictures. But I'm fundamentally an optimist."
Otto Dix—Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas Attack, engraving, 1924
Wartime Drawings
In the late 1980s, I experienced a powerful art exhibition highlighting the great artists of the German Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century. My favorite artist was Otto Dix, who served in World War I. He created powerful works of art with visceral intensity, humor, and emotion. His honesty illustrated the horrific situations of war and the demented reality that war brings to the civilian population. Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann were visual messengers of war. I'm out of harm's way, but their muse has transcended me to draw my interpretation of modern-day images of war.
