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...”
