Jeremy Blake (October 4 1971 – July 17 2007) was a digital artist and an American painter known for his innovations in merging and expanding the meaning and conceptions of painting with digital technology into video installations, DVDs, C-prints, and collaborative film projects.

A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, the highlights of his career included being selected three times in a row for the prestigious American art showcase Whitney Biennial for 2000, 2002 and 2004. His "Winchester" series was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005.

Blake also created the painted abstract hallucination scenes in the 2002 Paul Thomas Anderson film Punch Drunk Love, and contributed artwork and video for Beck's album Sea Change. Blake was also involved in creating and commissioning a soundtrack album called "The Forty Million Dollar Beatnik" with Neil Landstrumm and Mike Fellows in 2000 on Scandinavia Records to accompany an LA drawings/script show by Blake of the same title.

Blake was the romantic partner of filmmaker, cultural critic and pioneering video game artist Theresa Duncan. In February 2007, the couple moved from Los Angeles to New York City, where Blake had a job at Rockstar Games. On July 10 2007, Blake found Duncan dead, apparently by suicide. On July 17 2007, Blake was reported missing off New York's Rockaway Beach. According to news accounts, a woman called 911 to report that she saw a man swimming out to sea. Blake's clothes and wallet were reportedly found under the boardwalk at Rockaway's 122nd Street Beach, along with a suicide note that referred to Duncan.

On the morning of Sunday, July 22 2007, a body thought to be that of Jeremy Blake was discovered 4.5 miles off the coast of Sea Girt, New Jersey (which is 35 miles south of Rockaway Beach). Police announced on July 31 2007 that they had identified his body.

According to friends and family of the couple along with various news reports, Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan believed that they were being followed and harassed by Scientologists up to the time of their deaths. Blake also included his allegations of harassment by Scientologists and others in a 27-page "chronicle" he prepared for a lawsuit he planned to file.

The couple was posthumously profiled in the September 10, 2007 issue of Newsweek.

External links

• "Staircase to Nowhere" article from LAist about the events leading up to Blake's suicide

• "The world as Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan saw it" from the Los Angeles Times

• Remembrance of Jeremy Blake with clips from various digital works from The Minneapolis Review.

*Corcoran Gallery of Art detailed bio