Donna Cedar-Southworth

Elan Magazine, March 2019

Time and Distance

"The paintings in Carolee Jakes’s “Time and Distance” look fine at Studio Gallery, but some of them would also fit nicely around the corner at the Phillips Collection. Like some of the artists whose work Duncan Phillips collected in the mid-20th century, the McLean artist makes abstracted landscapes in lush, complex hues of earth and sky."

Mark Jenkins

The Washington Post, September 14, 2018

Something Old, Something New

". . . a show of paintings, prints, and one mixed media work. Included are woodblocks of intricate, nautilus-like forms underwater and a “Tsunami” in which loosely painted waves crest behind a hard-edge globe. That picture’s contrast between surges and circles continues in “Just Another Cloudy Day in May,” a striking triptych in which the center panel is higher than the two flanking it. If Jakes’s landscapes don’t present philosophical or environmental parables, their ingenious compositions have a narrative flair."

Mark Jenkins

The Washington Post, May 12, 2022

"A spiraling cosmos of carved black lines, Carolee Jakes's 'Stupor Mundi' is intricate, impressive and just plain big. The title of the Northern Virginia artist's five-foot-high woodblock print translates as 'marvel of the world,' although 'marvel at the world' would be just as apt. . . The strongest pieces are all coils, swells, and loops, cut permanently into wood amd inked unchangeably on paper so as to evoke ever-changing motion. The order they represent is both regular and deliriously random."

Mark Jenkins

Washington Post, November 15, 2020