Jeff Klarin lives and works in Los Angeles as part of BUGHOUSE, an art and design studio creating limited edition artwork and furniture. Exploring and pushing the boundaries of conventional
fabrication and visual representation is what drives his creations.

Many of his mixed-media pieces utilize photography, painting, illustration and transfer techniques that create organic 'accidents' that unexpectedly alter and transform the creative process. Using recycled wood and found materials is a recurring methodology in his work.

Jeff has shown in both solo and group exhibitions in Japan and the US.
and has received extensive coverage in British and European publications. He is in the collections of numerous film and music industry professionals.

"The collective iconography of our modern culture can be used in visual representation to unite people to question how we interrelate and thus create commonality and compassion."

My art is inspired by the personal but celebrates the universal. Fifteen years ago I found what I consider to be my voice and my vocabulary as an artist. With a consistent palette and use of both strong color and line, this vocabulary has freed me to focus more on the story I wish to tell and less on the words I use in the telling of that story. The recurring figures represented in many of my pieces have made their own journey as well. In earlier work they were lonely or lost souls fighting against excess and inner conflict, but now they are exclusively celebratory, loving and joyful – a direct reflection of the happiness and joy I’ve found in my own life with my wife, Nikki, and my daughters, Sienna and Kira. My process has evolved over the years from the use of acrylics and pastels on wood panel or canvas to what is now a true composite of both traditional and digital painting techniques. This includes the creation of key elements with acrylics and pastels, digitization of those elements, and finally refinement of composition, color and scale within the digital space. The seemingly simple and quickly resolving compositions serve as metaphors for the pure emotions they represent.

Annie Arrasmith: “Bits and Pieces”

When I was young, I lived in camps all up and down the Mississippi River as my dad followed the work on the levees. For play I made things out of what was at hand: sticks & stones & dirt. I can remember drawing whole worlds in the dirt out in the woods and then populating those worlds with little magical totems made of twigs & bark & moss & cicada shells, or making mobiles out of sticks & string & old lipton tea bags, and hanging them in the trees and leaving them.

In this current body of work, I’m still playing with what’s at hand: clay & ground earths & sticks & ceramic ‘stones.’ By ignoring narrative and presenting these odd bits and pieces of things in a formal way, I‘m asking you to slow down and attend to them for a moment: to be with this piece of old wood or that chunk of molded clay, and to see how beautiful they are in their odd imperfection.

To me these elements are like musical notes: I play & arrange & rearrange them until I feel a sense of satisfaction with the work as a whole; a sound or a note or a song I feel in my body—one that says, in the words of the great British actor Dame Maggie Smith:

“Yummy, yummy, yummy.”

It's all about color.

My work search for visual clues, metaphors and states of grace that might illuminate how the world of solid surfaces can exist alongside or within the ever-present backdrop of impermanence and change. My intention is to open a window, at least for a moment, where the static experience of a single view gives way to the ecstatic possibilities of the ephemeral. 

Self Portrait Series:  I collaborate with forces inside and outside the studio to make images that explore my own shifting understanding of “the self”.  In the past I have worked with rain and wind and a seasonal leak in the studio. My one rule: never force, always coax these collaborations into being.  More recently, I have been working with dust and debris from my studio floor. Each portrait represents the accumulation of dust from one particular day.  I cut a stencil and use a spray adhesive on mylar to collect the dust and to cast a shadow into each image.  

Old Is New Series: These sculptures are made from a series of paintings that I completed in 2005. Each sculpture is assembled from one painting in the series. The original series was inspired by building facades in and around the city of San Francisco. The powerful act of ripping a finished painting combined with the meditative act of sewing and mending created a new understanding of form and change.

The provocative use of space has always been of interest to me whether it be found in architecture, graphics, landscape design or paintings. My recent body of work encompasses my observations of the landscape, especially the sculptural display I find in the winter months. Through these paintings, I've explored the spacial relationships between the positive and negative areas and have tried to create a feeling of depth by using many layers of transparent glazes. The resulting artworks are explorations of a 3 dimensional sense of space on a flat surface.