There’s a quiet ceremony to the way artist and acclaimed children’s book illustrator Oliver Jeffers destroys his own paintings. At each dip performance—the latest held two days before the October 3 opening of his solo show at Praise Shadows in Boston—a portrait is revealed, admired for all of five minutes, and then submerged in a vat of enamel paint until the image disappears. The invite-only audience watches (no pictures allowed) in silence as gallons of hot pink or electric blue or neutral grey slide over the sitter’s face. It’s a strangely cheerful obliteration. Then Jeffers raises a glass of whiskey and offers his usual toast, equal parts Irish wake and inside joke: “What is done is done, and what is yet to come is yet to come.”
“It’s a death of sorts,” he told me in his Brooklyn studio, “but it’s also a form of birth, the painting isn’t complete until it’s dipped.” The subject this time was the Japanese artist and recent cancer survivor Yuri Shimojo—“the last in a samurai bloodline,” Jeffers noted—who, after watching her likeness vanish beneath the paint, felt not grief but relief. The performance lasted just a few minutes. Its emotional half-life will stretch much longer.
Jeffers treats serious subjects—death, climate change, violence—with more than a soupçon of humor. His “Disaster Paintings” are proof: a red-and-white city bus floats helplessly in a bucolic lake surrounded by grassy hills; fishermen scramble to douse a boat fire while, in the background, a meteor hurtles toward Earth. “It’s the end of the world,” Jeffers said as we looked at the fisherman together in his Brooklyn studio, “but it’s also just Tuesday.”
In one work-in-progress, leaning against a wall in his studio, one of his disaster paintings that made me laugh as soon as I saw it. “You can take a bleak idea,” he told me, “and dress it in absurdity. People will look longer.” He’s a Vonnegut with a paintbrush—offering laughter as a moral stance.
The idea for the “Dipped Paintings” came to Jeffers the way a lot of his ideas do—half accident, half thought experiment. “I’d been thinking about uncertainty,” he told me, “the idea that hidden variables—forces we can’t see—still shape everything we do.”
One day in 2012 he was working on what would become the first dip painting. Distracted by the logistics of the dipping mechanism, Jeffers forgot to photograph it before lowering it into the vat. A year later he stumbled across a single image of the undipped version. “I was shocked by how wrong my memory of it was,” he said. “It looked completely different in my head. That was the moment I realized what the project was really about.” The performances started soon after. And they won’t be around forever.
Since then, every sitter has been someone who’s stared down loss. Jeffers interviews them at length, pulling stories about mortality, chance, and change. During the performance the printed interview hangs about five feet in front of the portrait, available for reading if someone in the audience feels drawn to it. After the painting is dipped the interview, now on the floor, gets covered in drips and trickles of color when the portrait is rehung above it. “It’s about how fragile memory is,” he said, “and how quickly it slips away.”
His studio feels like an extension of himself: somewhere between a treehouse and an Oxford professor’s study. Nearly everything is made of wood at least twice Oliver’s age. Antique flat-file cabinets stack waist-high on one wall and tower eight feet on the other, labeled in his signature chalky, off-kilter capitals—the same handwriting that runs across his children’s books. Globes hang from the ceiling and perch on top of the cabinets.
Oliver Jeffers’s studio in Brooklyn.
In one corner sits a small white ghost from his “A Fraid of Ghosts” series—a wide-eyed little ghoul caught in monotonous moments: waiting for a phone call, trying to make small talk on a four-poster bed. “He’s terrified of being bored,” Jeffers said, laughing. “A bit like me.”
When we spoke, he wore a spotless white T-shirt, French-blue chinos patched so many times they could serve as a case study in Theseus’s Paradox, and white Vans. His hair formed a tidy James Dean swoop, tattoos flickering at his sleeves. When he talks, there’s enough energy coming off his musical Irish brogue to power two televisions and a record player.
Yng Ru Chen, founder of Praise Shadows, has known Jeffers for more than twenty years. “When I opened the gallery, I never imagined representing him,” she told me. “He already had this huge public life through his books. But for Oliver, painting has always been the core.”
Her gallery’s Boston address tends to make some of the art world’s more entrenched figures turn up their noses. At the whisper of children’s books and dip paintings they ask, “What’s his deal?” or “What’s the point?”—unable to fathom a multidisciplinary artist outside the tidy sculptor-painter-performance artist spectrum, or one who didn’t come through Yale.
Chen helped stage the Boston show and the intimate dip performance that preceded it. “Our goal,” she said, “is to make sure the general public is as aware of his fine-art practice as they are of his picture books. He’s an artist with a capital A—painting, writing, performing, storytelling—it’s all one voice.”
Her faith seems well placed: the entire “Dipped Paintings” installation, including the vat and performance remnants, was acquired by a major collector after the Boston premiere—a first for the series, and will ultimately end up in a museum.
Jeffers’s story begins far from Boston. Born in Australia in 1977 and raised in Belfast during the Troubles, he grew up surrounded by murals, soldiers, and contradiction. “I learned to avoid trouble and talk my way out of it,” he told the Guardian in 2022. The violence left him allergic to conflict; the murals left him with an unshakable sense of design. “The militant graphics of the loyalist walls and the folksy optimism of the nationalist ones—they both found their way into my work.”
He was the sort of child who’d rather be outside than reading. “I was much more interested in mischief,” he told me, with half a grin. Still, he drew constantly, convinced even then that he was, and would always be, an artist.
After studying at the University of Ulster, he began pairing words and images—drawn to how a caption could twist meaning. That simple idea would define everything he made after.
The first result was How to Catch a Star, an art-school project published in 2004 to instant acclaim. Lost and Found followed two years later, earning him the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. Since then his picture books—The Heart in the Bottle, The Day the Crayons Quit, Here We Are—have sold nearly fifteen million copies in forty-nine languages. “The kids’ books came as an accident,” he said. “They were made to satisfy my curiosity. It was luck that kids liked them.”
Jeffers long ago stopped worrying about the divide between fine art and children’s books. “I used to care,” he said. “Then I stopped.” The handwriting that loops across his canvases reappears in his picture books, and the same curiosity drives both. His Brooklyn studio, with its ghosts, globes, and patched trousers, proves that whimsy and rigor can coexist.
Installation shot of Oliver Jeffers Dipped Paintings at Praise Shadows.
Dan Watkins
Much of his work flirts with the hard sciences, mathematics, cosmology. In Meanwhile Back on Earth—a kind of illustrated peace manifesto—a father drives his children through the solar system to show them how petty human conflict looks from space. “Perspective can come from time or distance,” Jeffers writes. “When you take a deep breath, you calm down because that gives you the perspective of time. When you get far enough away, the battle doesn’t seem so important anymore.”
He’s turned that philosophy into an artistic through-line: a belief that humor, perspective, and empathy are the only real antidotes to catastrophe.
That idea found a perfect home in 2022, when the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum invited Jeffers to create its Anne H. Fitzpatrick façade. During his residency he painted Universes: a woman reading by lamplight while, above her, a deep-blue cosmos unfolds into constellations and comets. It was classic Jeffers—domestic intimacy set against infinite space. “He’s always playing between the cosmic and the everyday,” Chen said. “It’s his sweet spot.”
The project coincided with his first Praise Shadows solo, a hint of the creative momentum that would crest in 2025. Between the Gardner façade, the new “Dipped Paintings” exhibition, and a new Brooklyn Museum collaboration, Jeffers had quietly orchestrated his own small universe—each project orbiting the same questions of memory, time, and perspective.
At the Brooklyn Museum, Life at Sea expands that orbit. The installation, designed by the museum’s contemporary-art and education departments, invites visitors to build their own floating worlds. “There’s a real generosity in Oliver’s work,” said Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s deputy director. “He connects people to complex ideas in very accessible ways.”
The room glows with soft blues and greens; models of imaginary boats drifted in shallow pools. “It’s about care,” he said. “We’re all at sea, trying to navigate.” Then, smiling, he added, “Only difference is some of us have GPS.” The interns laughed, and so did he.
Atkins called the show a full-circle moment. Thirteen years earlier, Jeffers’s first dipped painting—Without a Doubt Pt. 2—had hung in the museum’s community-curated exhibition Go. Now he was back, his practice expanded to fill a department of its own.
Oliver Jeffers’s newest book, “I’m Very Busy.”
His newest picture book, I’m Very Busy was released on October 7. It follows a girl who discovers that friendship matters more than productivity. “It’s a funny little fable,” he said. “But it’s also about slowing down—something I’m still trying to learn.” On October 14 Jeffers hit late night with an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to talk about his new book—a rare mainstream spotlight for an artist who still talks about memory like a physicist and loss like a comedian.
That tension between absurdity and permanence runs through everything Jeffers makes. “All art is about time,” he told me as we packed up to leave his studio. “Some people try to freeze it. I like to acknowledge it.” The “Dipped Paintings” will conclude in 2027 at the Ulster Museum in Belfast—the city where he grew up and, during the pandemic, returned to live. He’s got the final subject in mind already, but wouldn’t share who it would be, a funny little performance in itself.
“I knew from the start he’d be the last one,” Jeffers said. “It felt right—this person’s seen more endings than anyone I know.”
Until then, he’ll keep moving—between Brooklyn and Belfast, between picture-book worlds and vats of enamel, between catastrophe and punchline. In his studio, a porcelain rocket bobs in a sea of blue like a rubber duck that took a wrong turn. It’s funny and a little heartbreaking, which is precisely the point. Jeffers doesn’t paint to preserve the world; he paints to remind us how ridiculous it is that we ever thought we could.
