Jeff Bedrick, San Rafael, USA
Member Since September 2006
Artist Statement Jeffrey K. Bedrick was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1960 and moved with his family to Northern California in 1971. His artistic ability was recognized early as it developed in the Bohemian world of 1970s hippie culture.
At thirteen, he spent time visiting the studio of his neighbor, renowned surrealist Norman Stiegelmeyer who coined the term "Visionary" to describe a contemporary art movement that focused on spiritual and utopian "visions" experienced in altered states of consciousness - whether through drugs or meditation. Later at sixteen, Jeffrey met his idol, Gage Taylor, a painter of fantastic landscapes and a colleague of Steigelmeyer. Taylor accepted Bedrick as a private apprentice. By eighteen, Bedrick was accepting invitations to exhibit his work alongside his mentors. He continued his studies at the College of Marin with Bill Martin, another renowned Visionary landscape painter. For over 20 years since, Bedrick has produced art in a wide variety of genres and media.
He spent a year studying cinematography and animation at San Francisco State University and earned a modest living as an art assistant at Colossal Pictures, a San Francisco animation studio. He also continued exibiting and selling his original paintings in numerous gallery shows during the art boom of the mid-eighties. He later stretched into the arena of commercial illustration. In 1989, he moved from the bucolic beauty of Marin County across the bridge to immerse himself in the urban life of San Francisco. There, he struggled as a freelance commercial illustrator until 1993 when he was taken under contract by Collector's Editions, a major fine art publisher. He spent the next year producing a large body of new work, culminating in a major Tokyo exhibit.
When his contract with Collector's Editions ended, he returned to commercial illustration and landed a major job as color keyist for the animated feature "Fern Gully 2" with Wild Brain animation studio in San Francisco. In the meantime, he had met his future wife Freya, another artist as well as model and floral designer. After completing the Fern Gully project, Bedrick began working with his first computer. He interviewed for an artist position at a San Francisco computer game developer and got the job. He then moved on to work for numerous digital entertainment developers in the San Francico and Los Angeles areas with increasing breadth of creative responsibilities at each position. In 2003, he completed a six-month contract with DreamWorks/PDI back in the San Francisco Bay Area as a digital matte painter for Shrek 2, the highest-grossing animated film of all time. He then spent a year in Seattle as art director for a small game developer for several games including the online version of Lemony Snickett's "A Series of Unfortunate Events".
Moving freely between fine art and commercial art, he has done illustration and design for feature films, television, the stage, advertising, print, computer games and the internet. His fantastic paintings have been published in countless forms including gift cards, posters, limited edition prints, books, magazines, puzzles, and other collectibles. Notable projects include background art for animated features, Shrek 2, The Little Mermaid 2, Fern Gully 2, Dudley Do-Right, many TV commercials; digital art for scores of interactive media titles; numerous book illustrations including a children's book Weather for Doubleday; 3D design for Cybertown - The Sci-fi Community of the Future. Corporate collections include The San Francisco Opera, Pacific Telesis, Mazda, Proctor & Gamble, and GTE. He is listed in 2000 Outstanding Artists & Designers of the 20th Century
After some legal negotiations with former publishers, he finally retrieved all rights to publish his own work and immediately launched Bedrick Fine Art Editions, which offers fine quality giclee prints of his many original images.
Bedrick and his wife parted ways in 2004 with shared cu
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