Following is The New York Times obituary of Jake Berthot.

"Jake Berthot, a Painter Inspired by the Natural World, Dies at 75"
By Roberta Smith, January 14, 2015

Jake Berthot, a painter who gained notice in New York City for his romantically minimal style, then found inspiration in the natural world after moving north to a hamlet in Ulster County, died on Dec. 30 at his home in Accord, N.Y. He was 75.

Betty Cuningham, whose gallery represented him, confirmed his death, which she said came after a long illness.

Mr. Berthot had a brief flirtation with Minimal Art in the mid-1960s. But, like many members of his generation, he soon sought ways to soften, complicate and enrich the style's severity. He was guided in this by his admiration for Abstract Expressionists like Milton Resnick and Mark Rothko, whose work was simplified but emotive.

He began to work in subtle monochromes of gray and green in the late 1960s in a manner similar to that of the painter Brice Marden. But Mr. Berthot's surfaces were differentiated by their expressive texture and their suggestions of space and atmosphere.

In many ways, Mr. Berthot spent his career exploring how to supplement and expand on the modernist monochrome without straying too far from it. At first he attached narrow vertical bars to either side of all-gray canvases. He also framed thickly worked monochromes with more thinly painted canvases, creating the effect of a window or of an abstract painting within an abstract painting.

For a while he pursued thickly built-up surfaces to which he added ovals or column-like rectangles in contrasting, sometimes even bright, colors. Most of his paintings began with an underlying grid of pencil that his brushwork alternately denied and confirmed.

After 1996, when Mr. Berthot left Manhattan for Accord, the natural world became an increasing influence. He turned to depicting trees and hills so close in tone to their backgrounds that they almost seemed carved from them. Some of his most beautiful paintings were nocturnal landscapes or expanses of night skies illuminated by a few rays from the moon.

These works had a timeless quality and reflected his admiration for 19th-century landscape painters like George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder and J. M. W. Turner. He once told an interviewer that he was "not interested in the new but in trying to make paintings that refuse to grow old." His art started rounding back toward abstraction in 2008.

John Alex Berthot was born in Niagara Falls, N.Y., on March 30, 1939. His father abandoned the family when John was quite young, and he grew up on his grandparents' truck farm in central Pennsylvania. He received his first drawing lessons from his grandmother.

Mr. Berthot initially studied at a commercial art school in Pittsburgh but realized that he lacked the necessary precision in drawing. Moving to New York City, he worked as a window dresser in the Bronx. When his wife got a secretarial job at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he was able to attend classes there tuition free.

At Pratt he began to paint seriously and soon had his first experience as a teacher. Starting in 1974, he taught for extended periods at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the School of Visual Arts.

Mr. Berthot had his first gallery show in New York in 1963 and showed regularly at the McKee Gallery and then the Betty Cuningham Gallery, both in Manhattan. Surveys of his work were held at Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in 1988 and at the Phillips Collection in Washington in 1996.

When he decided to bequeath the paintings in his studio to the Phillips, the museum offered to exhibit them, as a gift, during his lifetime. Mr. Berthot, who once described painting as "the only thing I can do," declined, saying that he needed the paintings around him.

His marriages to Ginny MacKenzie and Kristin Flynn both ended in divorce. He is survived by his son, John, from his first marriage.

Jake Berthot was born in 1939 in Niagara Falls, New York and reared by his maternal grandparents on a dirt farm in rural Pennsylvania. Because he was dyslexic, he had trouble with schoolwork, yet he loved writing and reading. When he was alone, he would make pages of "pretend writing," scrolling script that flowed across the paper without real words or syntax, and he drew pictures constantly. His talent was recognized and encouraged by his grandmother.

He attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, but left at the beginning of his second year. At loose ends, he next attended a technical school where he took a window-dressing course. In 1960 he married his high school sweetheart, Ginny MacKenzie and they had one son, John. The window-dressing helped support them for years while he tried to find himself in painting. He went to Pratt for evening classes and soon was invited to teach a class there. He also taught at Cooper Union and has taught at Yale since 1982. His work has moved from cool geometric abstractions to encrusted, passionately felt canvasses that seek to unveil "bare-boned, raw experience."

Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.

Source:
Margaret Moorman in Art News, January 1989