Jeremy Blake, 35, Artist Who Used Lush-Toned Video, Dies

Jeremy Blake, an up-and-coming artist who sought to bridge the worlds of painting and film in lush, color-saturated, hallucinatory digital video works, has died, the New York City Police said yesterday. He was 35 and lived in the East Village in Manhattan.

Paul J. Browne, the chief Police Department spokesman, said that a body found by a fisherman July 22 in the waters off Sea Girt, N.J., had been identified as that of Mr. Blake. The cause of death was presumed to be suicide, Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Blake was reported missing on July 17, when his clothes and wallet were found on a beach in the Rockaways, in Queens. A bystander reported that she saw a man disrobing that evening and walking out into the surf.

Mr. Blake’s companion of a dozen years, Theresa Duncan, 40, a writer, filmmaker and former video-game designer, had committed suicide a week earlier, on July 10, and Mr. Blake found her body in their apartment, according friends of the couple. The police said that a note found on the beach with his belongings made reference to Ms. Duncan’s death.
Mr. Blake began to make a name for himself in the late 1990’s with digital projections that combined colorful abstract geometric forms with photographic images — poolside cabanas, Modernist interiors, patio lights, skylines — that suggested scenes from movies. Some art critics described the work as Color Field paintings set in motion. He called much of his work “time-based paintings,” and wrote that he drew his subject matter from a fascination with “half-remembered and imaginary architecture” and images borrowed from “Hollywood’s psychic dustbin.”

He began to veer more toward the narrative and documentary in works like his “Winchester” video trilogy, which was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005. The videos focused on the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., a 160-room mansion with mazes of hallways and dead-end staircases, built by Sarah Winchester, the widowed heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, to try to protect herself from ghosts of gunshot victims whom she believed would haunt her.
A 2003 work at Feigen Contemporary gallery (now Kinz, Tillou & Feigen), was inspired by the diaries of Ossie Clark, the flamboyant English fashion designer who helped create the mod look in the 1960’s.
Jed Perl wrote last year in The New Republic that Mr. Blake had “the clearsighted cheerfulness of the madman working at the margins.”
His work, which was included in three Whitney Biennials, became known to a much larger audience when he created trippy, fluid sequences of abstract art for the 2002 movie “Punch-Drunk Love,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who had seen an exhibition of Mr. Blake’s art while working on the film.
Mr. Blake was born in Fort Sill, Okla., but his family soon moved to the Washington area, and he was reared in Takoma Park, Md.
He received a bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and a master’s in 1995 from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. His father, Jeffrey Blake, who worked in commercial real estate, died when Mr. Blake was 17.
He is survived by his mother, Anne Schwartz Delibert; a half-sister, Adrienne Delibert; and a stepfather, Arthur Delibert, all of Bethesda, Md.
A new work in progress by Mr. Blake called “Glitterbest,” a collaboration with the musician and designer Malcolm McLaren, was to have been shown in an exhibition of Mr. Blake’s work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in late October. Older pieces scheduled for the exhibition will be shown, the gallery said, but the status of the new project is uncertain. Jonathan P. Binstock, the exhibition’s curator and a former curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran, said the gallery would try to “present as full a picture as possible of this work.”