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Biography - Jerry Cutler
A farm boy in rural Wisconsin, Cutler had a talent for drawing. At age 13 he announced that he would be an art teacher, though he had never met one himself. In high school Cutler took correspondence art courses through the University of Wisconsin Extension before receiving direct instruction from an art teacher, newly hired, in his junior and senior years. He took his first degree at the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point and took up a teaching position with Platteville (Wisconsin) Public Schools. At the same time he began showing his paintings in juried exhibitions. In 1977 he took an MA in Painting at St. Cloud University in Minnesota and then taught there for 2 years. In 1980 he attended the Ohio State University earning an MFA degree in Drawing and Painting- and was hired at the University of Florida 1981. Cutler retired from UF's School of Art and Art History in 2010, accumulating 36 years of teaching art. Spending decades as a painter of the human figure, Cutler invented his landscape idiom in 1989 and has since been exclusively involved in that genre. His work comes in series, exploiting an idea until it dries up or leads to another line of thought. The paintings are a product of his prodigious sketchbook practice that includes drawings on site both of individual forms as well as practice compositions with many iterated variations of each idea and image. Often the subjects of large paintings are preceded with smaller versions. The paintings are completely based on site drawings, field studies, and studio based compositional variants. Over the years Cutler's paintings have been exhibited in nearly 200 group shows and over 30 solo shows. His paintings are held in private, public, and museum collections and his work is placed in numerous venues with the Florida's Art in State Buildings Program. Cutler paints regularly in his studio at his home in Gainesville where he lives with his wife Elizabeth Rich. |
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