Each of the artists at Eastern Market has a distinct style and many of them feature monuments and cityscapes in their work.
Jonathan Bloom catches you off guard with his monoprints of rabbis, ostriches and purple horses. He specializes in portraiture, both realistic and fictitious – and surprises you with familiar images layered into the paintings and prints. Jonathan’s best work integrates images of DC and NY monuments floating in the background. In additions to portraits, he creates monoprints and woodcuts, and paints ketubat, illustrated Jewish Wedding contracts.
A fixture at the Market in the 1990s, Jonathan moved to New York in X. Tom Eldson comes to the Market to sell his prints with some regularity. You can find Jonathan in Union Square or at Brooklyn Flea if you’re in New York, where he keeps a studio in Park Slope.
Jonathan traces his interest in faces (the top half of the face especially!) to an illustration he did for Stuff magazine in 1986. Now, with shows in New York, Provincetown, Boston, New Orleans, London, Berlin, Tel Aviv and Prague, those who bought his early work treasure those early pieces. Sadly, he’s mostly retired the Bert & Ernie images from that period.
(disclosure: this writer bought the Tolerance woodcut print in 1997, and the couple of a skinny-faced rabbi and Bert elicits varied responses from guests. However, ahem, I chose this profile because the success of Jonathan’s artwork at the market despite his abscence for years is quite a feat. And I really like Bert.)