About
Jay Flood is a Charlotte-based painter working across acrylic, oil stick, charcoal, and spray paint. His paintings bring figures, symbols, fragments of language, and graphic marks into close proximity, allowing each work to move between clarity and uncertainty.
The work is rooted in emotional states that resist easy resolution: attachment, conflict, misrecognition, grief, endurance, and the possibility of release. Rather than illustrating a fixed narrative, Flood builds scenes in which familiar images become unstable, carrying meaning without fully settling into it.
Practice
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Flood works through accumulation. Acrylic color, oil stick, charcoal, spray paint, hand-drawn line, and text are layered, covered, revised, and brought back into view. The paintings often begin with loose associations rather than a predetermined image, then develop through interruption and response.
His surfaces support that physical process. Built on custom hardwood floorboards, they retain a sense of structure and construction beneath the painted image. The work is not interested in a clean resolution; it leaves evidence of its own revisions, collisions, and changing priorities.
Themes
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These paintings return to the ways love can become difficult to navigate. Tenderness and friction, faith and doubt, fight and rest often appear together, without one cancelling out the other.
Flowers, fighters, figures, marks, and fragments of language operate as open signals rather than a fixed code. A rose can carry attachment and ache. A poppy can suggest rest after suffering. A blindfolded boxer can hold questions of trust, direction, and instinct. The aim is not to explain these images completely, but to let them remain active in the viewer’s own reading.
Statement
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I make paintings that begin where language starts to fall short. I am interested in the images that surface when love, grief, conflict, memory, and desire overlap, especially when they cannot be separated cleanly.
I work through layers of color, text, figures, symbols, and marks. Some elements arrive with an immediate association, while others remain unclear even to me. That uncertainty matters. The paintings are not meant to solve the feeling that produced them. They are places where opposing emotions can occupy the same room.
I return to the possibility that something can be carried honestly without being held forever. The work considers what remains after impact, what can be set down, and how rest might exist without requiring forgetting.
Biography
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These paintings return to the ways love can become difficult to navigate. Tenderness and friction, faith and doubt, fight and rest often appear together, without one cancelling out the other.
His current body of work explores the unstable territory between love and struggle, grief and release, trust and uncertainty. Flood builds many of his painting supports from hardwood floorboards, bringing a tactile, constructed quality to surfaces that are continually revised through his process.
Inquiries
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For exhibition opportunities, acquisitions, press requests, image licensing, or creative partnerships, contact hello@jayflood.com.