Canvas: Jason Woodside

By Paulette Perhach

How does one measure the success as an artist? Is it a measuring stick notched with the number of pieces sold? Is it a scrapbook of magazine articles and opening announcements? Or is it an hourglass with bits of sand bursting with color, showing the amount of time you spent simply creating?

St. Augustine native Jason Woodside can measure his success in any of those ways, but he chooses to calmly keep his eye on that hourglass.

“I just love painting. I’m not in it for any other reason. I just want to paint and enjoy my life, see as many things as possible,” said Woodside.

He manages a aloofness in territory that terrifies other artists: sales and marketing and business. It’s in the way he shrugs his shoulders and wrinkles his nose at topics such as making prints.

“It’s just not me,” he said. “(Painting’s) all I want to do. It’s awesome if it sells. That’s crazy.”

His calm manner contrasts his paintings, which have the energy of a cartoon: drips drop, arrows throb their directions, light squiggles and cracks across the canvas as vampires plot.

Brothers Frank and Franc (Franc has the curling mustache) live out lives in a thickly outlined America and France.

Woodside uses only a handful of colors, just his favorites, and doesn’t mix.

“I love metallics,” he said. “All those colors are so solid. It really rocks out.”

As far as selling, he finds that it’s sometimes more sad than anything else.

“I’ll think, ‘Man, I don’t know if I want to sell that picture. It has a lot to do with my life,’” he said. “Artwork is a really special thing, to me.”

Woodside’s confidence as an artist began with parents who told him he could do anything.

“I honestly thought I was Superman until I was 13,” he said. “Then I was like, ‘Wait a second; they’re just really nice.’”

His grandmother taught him to paint, but Woodside also found joy in making clothing and shooting pictures. After high school, he started studies in film at the School of Visual Arts in New York City two days before 9/11.

If there was ever a time he wanted to quit, it was when he was 18 and alone in a city that had gone unhinged.

“So many people give up,” he said. “That’s what separates me from the next guy.”

If he had flown home, he would have never sold a piece to Michel Roux, who helped him land an apprenticeship with Romero Britto, a pop artist commissioned by Absolut Vodka with a waiting list of customers that includes Madonna and Michael Jackson. Woodside joined Britto in Miami to learn techniques as they worked together on projects, such as painting soccer balls for the 2006 World Cup soccer tournament in Germany.

“With him I saw how high you can really go,” Woodside said. “He showed me that if you want to make it, just make it happen.”

Had he flown home, he would have never been at the right place at the right time to get hired by Milla Jovovich to paint an ad for her high-end fashion line and work art direction for her line.

Now 25, Woodside is painting every day at his cluttered apartment in Long Beach, Calif. He’s shown work in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Sydney.

Although it feels good when he comes home to St. Augustine, he doesn’t think he’ll be moving back any time soon.

“If I was in St. Augustine, I think I would try to sell my art on the street. That’s awesome. Not even sell it, show it.”

Woodside has lately turned an eye to public art. He’d love to be painting murals in parks, and that might just be his next big step.

“I think people need to see that,” he said. “It brings life to things that don’t have life.”

Whatever opportunities spring up, Woodside knows the most important times are those in his paint-smeared, glitter-sprinkled apartment, when Iggy Pop helps pass the sands of Woodside’s lifetime that he spends creating.

“It kind of just feels good to make it,” he said. “It’s all about making it happen.”