Artist Ed Jaffe, most recently from Virginia, almost didn't move here. He turned his back on the circa 1900 farmhouse along Highland Avenue four years ago, didn't think twice about a city he found stagnant, stuck romanticizing its factory-town past, drifting toward a seemingly inevitable decline. "It looked like it was dying," he said. He's changed his mind.
IN THE AFTERNOON LIGHT of his studio, Ed Jaffe paints a girl he saw years ago. He was strolling along an Ecuadorian when he spied her. Now the work is newly drawn and still colorless. Jaffe dabs white across the girl's shoulders.
When 82-year-old artist Ed Jaffe stands up from a chair, he does so slowly and with a pronounced grimace, but it would be reasonable to assume the act is merely for show — a performance so as not to confuse a younger person’s expectations of an old man. Jaffe is and is not a lot of things.
Ed Jaffe's studio of sculpted marble and textured paintings stands out like a sore thumb in Orange County. Amid the quiet gift shops and quaint eateries in the town of Orange, Ed Jaffe's exhibition space is a bit of a shock.
Many of Ed Jaffe's sculptures and paintings evoke images of Mysterious cultures and lost civilizations. The Mayans, Incas, Aztecs and Ancient Chinese emerge from the stone Jaffe carves into polished works of art. Those who meet his art before they meet the man could be excused for expecting Jaffe to be a mystic cloaked in the trappings of the Yucatan or the High Andes.