“Who’s afraid of color? Certainly not Jonas Gerard. Such energy embodies the sensation he has of ‘swimming in a world of sound, shapes and emotions.’ The idea of composition has resonance, for Gerard stresses his arts link to world music. A sense of various cultures pulsates through the paintings.”
William Zimmer, New York Times, NYC
“There is nothing vague or unresolved or indefinite about Gerard’s abstractions. Even though his work has no familiar form, it comes across as being about something real. Call it human experience melted down into expressive colors and shapes…Despite the spontaneous air, Gerard’s compositions are impeccable. They are about real things, the underside of the seeable world, the side that determines people’s lives, the unobservable one that lies beneath external reality. Clearly Gerard knows that beneath a flower is the idea of growing, that beneath the sea is the idea of flowing. And that he knows these ideas, though invisible, have power.”
Joan Altabe, Art Critic, Sarasota Herald Tribune
In his 50 years as an artist, Jonas Gerard’s life has been as colorful and passionate as the abstract paintings that explode spontaneously onto his canvases…From the first step into the large gallery, one’s senses are happily assaulted with a riot of color, texture, and movement on canvas, the result of Gerard’s wildly spontaneous technique and his use of the finest acrylic paints.
Barbara Blake, Blue Mountain Living
“[His kind of music is] pumping and happy and passionate. It’ll do just the trick. Jamming his way into the canvas, he makes a big, gutsy stroke dripping with orange. He’s feeling good. Next, it’s eggplant purple. Then turquoise. There is no time for the critical mind. Only intuition and instinct. This is the moment–the passion–the spirit. This is Jonas Gerard.”
Jennifer McNally, The Laurel of Asheville
“Each splash of paint thrown jubilantly toward its target is tinted with some small piece of the strange and wonderful experience Gerard has encountered, from his beatnik days in New York to his humble presentation of the official United States Bicentennial portrait to President Gerald Ford in the White House.”
Paul Clark, Asheville Citizen Times
“It would be hard, maybe even impossible, to find anyone who is more passionate and energetic about his work than Asheville artist Jonas Gerard. His enthusiasm for his artwork is infectious, and the energy just pulsates through his studio in the River Arts District. Gerard’s studio is filled with expressionist paintings that explode across the canvas in a riot of color…Gerard is an artist with the heart of a showman, and he happily welcomes visitors into his studio to watch him work. As he paints, he dances in front of the canvas to music that blares raucously from his CD player…and talks while painting saying that he has no idea where the music and paint will take him.
William B. Leonard, Bold Life