The Californer - Meet The Major Lazer Music Producer Whose Contemporary Art Paintings Are Going Viral

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The Florida-Based, Self-Taught Contemporary Painter, JR Ramoutar, Has Been Featured In Seven Gallery Shows This Year.

ORLANDO, Fla. - Californer -- Florida-Based, Self-Taught Contemporary Visual Artist JR Ramoutar Has Been Featured In Seven Gallery Shows This Year.

JR Ramoutar's mix of surrealism and pop art, are inspired by 1930s drawings.

JR is all of us, post-pandemic? We'd like to think so.

"I started to get accepted into galleries fairly quickly – just two months after starting to paint, to be exact. It's kind of a strange story, but I've always had a fascination and appreciation for art, and when we purchased our first home I wanted to fill the loft with my favorite artwork. I realized that my budget didn't allow for that once I started to see price tags of various original artwork and so I wanted to paint my own generic pieces to put up in the meantime until I could afford art from the artists I loved. I purchased a bunch of acrylic paint, paintbrushes, and canvases back in 2020 and put them in my closet to work on whenever I had free time or on a rainy day, and I completely forgot about it. Almost two years went by where I worked on other things such as music and woodworking, and then randomly, at the end of 2021, I had the spontaneous urge to paint. I remembered the things that I bought that were in my closet, so I pulled them out and started to paint the idea I had in my head. That first painting ended up being a central character in much of my earlier works, I called the character Noah–he has a very simple form which really just consists of his limbs and his eyes and hands, inspired by 1930s cartoons with gloves on his hands and pie-shaped pupils. I eventually painted my biggest piece at the time, which was a 48"x 48" panel with Noah getting lost in an optical illusion, and sent it to Sobo Gallery for their Top Choice Awards, and to my surprise, I was selected! Phil at Sobo said he received almost 300 submissions but could only pick about 70 pieces for the show. It took off from there as I would start to submit to any show that featured a theme that I thought I could paint."

More on The Californer

JR currently has a series, "Acrylic Ting" on view at The Gallery 32789 in Orlando, Florida. The individual works are titled, "Rose from Garbage," Birds of a Warming Climate," and "Duck Duck Goose."

Visit https://www.instagram.com/jrramoutar/?hl=en to view JR's work.
For information on recent show at The Gallery 32789, visit https://thegallery32789.com/about-jr-ramoutar