Tag: black and white
Collector’s Choice: Jane Davies
janedaviesartgallery.com
Vertical Series
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Jane Davies’ work combines bold organic shape and line with layers of atmospheric transparency. The drawing seems to emerge from the layers of color as thoughts and their associated feelings rise from the subconscious mind. The images often seem to merge a stream of consciousness with a sense of recognition or realization through reflection. Color appears sometimes bold, other times subtle as a whisper. The drawing crashes in bold arcs through the images, as well as taps gently in contrasting rhythms of gentle glissando.
Written by Janis Kirstein
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Coastal Fragments
This is one of a series of pieces exploring the grid structure in a very limited palette of blues, greens, neutrals, with red as an accent color. I was interested in building atmospheric layers and textures, and contrasting the formal grid structure with freely expressive mark making. The results remind me of seascapes, weathered boat hulls, rocks, salt spray.
About Jane Davies
Rupert, VT – United States
Jane Davies is a full time artist working in paint, drawing media, collage, and occasionally encaustic. She offers workshops nationwide and online, helping people to find a personal and playful approach to art making. “I am most complimented when someone tells me that my work inspired them to try something new in their own art”.
Beginning as a potter in the early 1990s, Davies transitioned into freelance art in the early 2000’s, creating artwork for manufactured home décor and gift products. Fine art had always been a sideline for Davies, but in 2009 she began giving it her full attention, giving up the freelance work in favor of painting and teaching workshops.
“I realized that I did not really know who I was as an artist. My work had always been subject to the needs of outside demands – for sale, for a commercial product, or as instructional examples – and I wanted to know what happened if I just made art as a personal inquiry. I still want to know, and it is that ongoing quest that keeps me motivated”.
Jane Davies is the author of three books on collage and mixed media, one on ceramics, and has one DVD on painting and collage techniques.
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Black and White
In this series I am exploring mark-making, and seeing what I can do with it in the absence of color. Color is such a strong language in itself, so I am finding it interesting to focus on other aspects of the work, such as quality of line, value, layering, and pattern.
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Grids
This series is an exploration of grid and cruciform formats, using the rectangle as the basic element
Education:
• 1988 – 1990: I studied Ceramics at the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology, plus one year there as Artist in Residence, 1990 – 91. • BA in Philosophy at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, 1987.
Artist’s Statement
Formal elements are my foremost source of inspiration: color relationships, line, shapes, texture, pattern, and depth. It is after the fact that I connect my visual vocabulary to specific features of my experience.
I see in the Submerge series landscape, coastline, worn surfaces, rocks, tides – no doubt a reflection of my childhood spent in Nova Scotia.
The Washed Up series I’m trying to throw together disparate elements, as if they washed up on the beach in a random arrangement, and then see how I can relate them to one another formally.
In the Pattern Grids I see rhythm, counterpoint, perhaps a visual expression of a fascination with cycles and frequencies engendered by my background in music (think ukulele, starting at the age of five).
Like many artists, my process involves a balance between intuitive mark making, and careful deliberation. I try to stay present to this dialog with the painting, and discover possibilities, rather than force the painting to a preconceived conclusion. Each one is a surprise. I leave my paintings open to interpretation by the viewer.
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Big Fat Art
Big Fat Art is a state of mind rather than a specific kind of art; it is all about exploring mark-making, throwing unlikely elements together to see how they dance together on the page, and keeping a lot of them in process. Some of them become finished pieces.
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Collector’s Choice: Jessica Jenney
About Jessica Jenney
Jessica Jenney photographs the natural world with an emphasis on intimate landscapes with a romantic flair. The idyllic beauty of Jessica Jenney’s ethereal floral and landscape images transcends time and place. Jessica’s painterly treatment of her photographs creates tranquil and bucolic scenes reminiscent of the Romantic era painters.
In sharp contrast to her nature photography, her latest passion is capturing New York City and it’s architecture, in monochromatic tones and warm golden hues.
Her work is licensed with: PI Creative Art
Above, you see her photograph of the Flatiron Building with its distinctive triangular shape, designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and built in 1902. It was allowed it to fill the wedge-shaped property located at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The building was intended to serve as offices for the George A. Fuller Company, a major Chicago contracting firm. At 22 stories and 307 feet, the Flatiron was never the city’s tallest building, but always one of its most dramatic-looking, and its popularity with photographers and artists has made it an enduring symbol of New York for more than a century.
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Jessica Jenney’s black and white photographs of New York City’ s architecture present a haunting beauty of this grand city with all of its beautiful buildings and feats of engineering. In contrast, her floral photographs present bold to soft colored delicate petals and stamens, all with exquisite contrast, detail and texture. The unified vision of the artist remains constant throughout both groups of works through its implication of a Romantic perspective built upon the capture of grand movements, bold to subtle textures, dramatic perspectives and viewpoints and through the use of rich contrast. With her sensitive eye to detail, Jenny successfully and compellingly captures the heart and soul of the natural as well as the human-made world.
Janis Kirstein
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