“If the message touches the heart, it never dies.”
Jay Kruse
“All art forms are delivery systems: precision instruments for transmitting meaning across the gap between minds. The question I have spent my life asking is: how do you engineer one that actually works?”
(JK)
Jay Kruse was born in Houston in 1968 into a family where making things with your hands was simply what people did. His father carved figurative sculpture; Jay was drawing complete figures before preschool. Art was assumed. Then, as a high school freshman, music hijacked everything.
He became a serious bassist - rock, then blues, then jazz - but a second disruption was already forming. He became absorbed by the reed and bamboo flutes of the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent: instruments with thousand-year design histories, built on proportion systems so refined they had barely been altered in a millennium. He eventually sold everything he owned and bought a one-way ticket to Turkey to study with the masters of his teacher’s lineage. It was formative, difficult, and clarifying.
Back in the United States, Jay built a parallel practice: performing across an improbable range of traditions (belly dance ensembles, medieval music groups, a Scottish bagpipe percussion outfit), teaching and making instruments by hand. The deeper he went into instrument construction, the more one thing kept surfacing: geometry. Not as decoration, but as the hidden operating system underneath acoustic behavior, proportion and why certain objects feel inevitable while others merely function.
That discovery became the foundation of everything. When Jay returned to visual art after decades away, he wasn’t coming back to painting: he was bringing the instrument-maker’s logic with him. His Chronoglyph series applies the same proportion systems that govern his instruments to works on panel: layered, structural, dense with internal logic. The newer talisman-engineered pieces go further - copper coils, handmade orgonite, resin and material choices made with the same deliberateness a luthier brings to wood selection. These are not decorative objects. They are built to do something, and built to last.
Jay operates under the studio name Heretic Works - from the Greek hairetikos, meaning “one capable of choosing.” It is a quiet manifesto. Every piece is a considered decision about what knowledge is worth encoding, what proportions are worth preserving, and what objects are worth sending forward into time.
He is based in Oakland, California, where he maintains an active practice in music, instrument making, and visual art. Commissions and teaching inquiries are welcome.