Jordan Donald is an Ashkenazi/African-American/Jamaican painter working in acrylic and pastel on canvas. Each painting begins as an environment: a plain ground and a few blocks of single color. He enters it the way he would a room for the first time, and reacts. Heavy layers of acrylic go down until half-figures arrive on their own. Each form gets a decision: he censors the ones that turn too legible with opaque white or black, scrapes back the ones that aren't legible enough so what's underneath can breathe, and leaves the rest where they landed. Pastel comes last, to accentuate whatever survived. Jordan grew up ethnically ambiguous and developed a reflex for adjusting to whatever each room expected, because being easy to sort puts people at ease. His paintings reclaim that reflex, building each image from microadjustments made in real time, toward a picture that refuses to resolve. He studied the history of art and architecture at Harvard and began painting in earnest in Mexico City. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.

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