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 Contact Information:
  Phone: (323) 301 - 2561
 E-mail: jeanmonfort@jjmartstudio.com

 Designed by:
 

On canvasses explosive with sensuous colors, primitive artist Jean Joseph Monfort opens the gates of Paradise, flooding the viewer with the richness and drama of the Haiti in which he lived for over 30 years.

Born in Jeremie, Haiti in June 1951, Monfort completed his education in Port-au-Prince. For 10 years he played soccer professionally, traveling throughout the islands of St. martin, the Dominican Republic, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Barbados with the soccer team becoming a well known Haitian athlete.

Monfort began to paint in 1973. Inspired by the tradition of naïf art in Haiti, he takes the simple, commonplace activities of daily life - working the sugarcane fields, turning the can into molasses, washing clothes, fetching water - and creates an art that, while fantastical, evokes a deeper story, the sorrow, the poverty, the Haitian struggle for freedom, the roughness of days beneath the sweltering Caribbean sun. The work exposes a formidable talent; Monfort's precise technical skills can be found through the use of light and color in his nature scenes, which haunt the immigration and hint at a man of deep spirituality, a man who loves passionately his West Indian homeland, a man whose wonderfully startling memories seem to breathe life into his paintings, almost pulling the viewer down a dirt road at sunset, barefoot, toward a turquoise sea.

Jean came to Los Angeles in 1982, and the next year began showing his work, with exhibitions at UCLA and California State University, Long Beach. His work has also been displayed in exhibitions of black artists at the Fox Hills and Hawthorn malls. In mid December, he opened his own Gallery - something to which he has aspired for many years. Because the artist is so prolific, his original canvasses, diptychs, triptychs and prints are affordable and grace the walls of art collectors throughout the world. Monfort now lives in Los Angeles, where he paints about 10 hours a day . Some of his family still resides in Haiti, so Jean returns when he can - not just to visit, but to drink the Haitian Rhum.

For more information, call: (323) 301-2561.