Jay Milder: Unblotting the Rainbow

Originally published on Berkshire Fine Arts

Jay Milder was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1934. His ancestry connects him to the Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760), the patriarch of Hasidism and mystical Judaism, and the Hasidic mystic Rebbe Nachman (1772-1810) of Breslov, who founded a branch of Hasidic Judaism that emphasizes joy and intensity in living life through God.

Beginning in his later teenage years, Milder would begin to explore this mystical lineage, which fueled him with a desire to journey across the globe. Milder began his travels at the age of twenty, when he went to Paris to study the cubist style of painting at La Grande Chaumiere and the Sorbonne. He also took painting classes with Andre L’Hote (1885-1962) and studied sculpture with the Russian born sculptor, Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967). Milder later recalled that he received praise from his teachers for incorporating a very rough, expressionistic, and organic approach to the Cubist style. Zadkine introduced Milder to the work of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943).

Archetypes of Humankind’s Pursuit to Make Something that is at the Same Time Elemental and Informed by Conscious Intellect.

Jay Milder, Expulsion IND, 1966, oil on Canvas, 34 x 36 in.

Jay Milder, Space Dreams #35, 1968, Oil on Canvas,

Jay Milder, Bird Song – circa 1975, Oil on canvas 49 x 50 in

“In my paintings, I use biblical and Midrashic tales. My method is Cabbalistic in that I work in a state of non-thinking revelation doing away with my intellect. I take a passage from the Bible, study it in many lights: its Hammurabic legal meaning, Talmudic and Midrashic meanings and all the commentary on it, even its Freudian counterparts. My method allows me to distill all this information; and working in a trance-like revelation, I am able to make a new commentary on it.” – Jay Milder