Artist/Game Designer Jeremy Blake's Body Found

A week after discovering his longtime girlfriend committed suicide, artist (he created Beck's* Sea Change* album cover, seen here.) and Rockstar Games designer Jeremy Blake piled his clothes, wallet, and a note under the boardwalk at Rockaway Beach in New York and walked into the Atlantic Ocean. The New York Police Department sent a scuba team into the waters where the 35-year-old, featured in Wired two years ago, was last seen but could not find his body. Yesterday, it was announced that a body caught found by fisherman on July 22nd is that of the famed artist.

According to the LA Times, friends and art peers of the couple say that prior to the pairs double suicide, the two believed they were being stalked and harassed by Scientologists.

Christine Nichols, a colleague and friend of Blake's since 1998, produced two art exhibitions, two books and a record in conjunction with the artist through the New York art gallery she co-founded, Works on Paper Inc. Nichols dates the couple's rising sense of "paranoia" to around 2004, two years after Blake created an album cover for alternative-rock star Beck, who is a practicing Scientologist.

"They thought Scientologists were really harassing them," Nichols said. "They would say, 'They are following us, harassing our landlord.' I did not see any evidence of that.

"But it got to be something that was huge to them -- a 'You're either with us or against us' thing where if you didn't believe them, you weren't on their side. The story they had woven in paranoia and conspiracies took over part of their lives. A lot of us couldn't understand that acting out."

Blake and his blogger-filmmaker girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, had been together for 12 years. They met when Blake produced artwork for Duncan's girl geared CD-Rom games.

The two moved from New York to LA when Blake was working on the abstract film sequences for Paul Thomas Anderson's quirky film, Punch-Drunk Love. In February they moved back to New York, where Blake had accepted a job as an in-house graphic designer for Rockstar Games.

Blake's work has been shown at the LA's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the San Francisco MoMA. He was set to have an exhibition in Washington in late October, in collaboration with musician and designer Malcolm McLaren. No word on if the show will go on.