With their poetic air and mix of abstraction and representation, Jered Sprecher’s gentle, tentative paintings and drawings suggest the work of Gerhard Richter. In fact Richter was an influence, but an encounter with an elderly woman while Sprecher was in grad school was even more important. While still an undergraduate at Concordia University in Nebraska, Sprecher went on a class trip to a nursing home to do clay portraits of the residents, then later returned to sketch them on his own. “My lines were a bit scratchy and shaky,” he says, “and I began to think of their frailness as depicting the state the patients were in. Interacting with these people and hearing their stories seemed more important than the art I was making.” The physical and mental deterioration of some of these formerly fit, productive farmers and nurses made him aware of his own mortality.
