2023 Visiting Artist Exhibition…
SEPTEMBER 8 - 30TH
Opening Reception:
Friday, September 8th, 5 - 8pm / Art Talk from 7 - 8pm
VIEW PRESS RELEASE
Please join us Friday, Sept 8th, 5 - 8pm to welcome and celebrate ASiF’s 2023 Visiting Artist!
Jean Pettigrew Whelan's 2023 exhibit entitled, And Now I Find Myself, includes a range of two dimensional works in various media, from figurative to landscape to studio still lifes. Her series of figurative works are intuitive and gestural, using the human form as templates with layered abstracted imagery - her landscapes are primitive and sensory, while the studio still lifes are a series depicting the artist’s renderings of carefully curated objects. The uniqueness of these come in the form of a stack of books, a tidy pile of patterned tablecloths - a flag, a skull, a theatrical mask balancing on a stool or a stack of milk crates. This still life series of beloved objects, referred to by Whelan as "intimate spaces and objects of affection", feel deeply personal in their carrying of cultural meanings and curious connections. Her landscape series depict meditations of wild amorphous islands in percussive textural fields, while the abstract figurative works use simple yet beautifully descriptive lines with disconnected contours in luscious color to describe what could be a synaptic dance. What comes through in all of the work is the artist's deep, unsuppressed and unselfconscious curiosity of self and the world, inspired by its poetry, literature, art, history and spirituality.
Whelan describes her work as an exploration of interior spaces, the corporeal-physical body, the metaphysical, ontological, the liminal space, the imaginative space and real space - spiritual dimension, the ethereal - doors to known, doors to unknown - where paintings are the doors.
Visit Jean's website: paintcooklove.com to learn more about her!
Biography:
Jean Pettigrew Whelan was born in Palo Alto in 1968. Earning a BFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990 and an MFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004, she has taught painting and drawing to preschoolers through MFA candidates, raised a family and maintained a studio practice in San Francisco.
Artist Statement:
I don’t always know where I’m going as I find my way into my work, and I have literally painted myself out of corners. Delight in discovering a solution in a painting or in noticing a particular moment of beauty and revealing it is what I am after. I am open to energy, emotion, the unexpected. I trust inspiration and I run with it. Even the grotesque can be coaxed into something beautiful.
Working in a variety of media and on a few series’ concurrently, I have time to pause and reflect between projects. Each of these projects has its own momentum and making different kinds of work helps me to propel myself forward. Perhaps it was motherhood where I learned the beauty of multitasking?
“Currently I am working on a series of large abstract and figurative oil paintings, a series of imaginary landscapes (based on an uninhabited island in the Inland Sea in Japan) in oil paint, stacks of books in acrylic on canvas, sumi Ink drawings, and gouache on paper. In the gouache pieces and in the abstract oil paintings’, I have been making and using stencils. These have taken on a life of their own and have ended up as collages. Recently, I made a film with footage from my time at a residency in Wexford Ireland last March. Each of these different series and mediums informs each other. As Gerhardt Richter said, “I like continual uncertainty.”
ASiF gallery is open Saturdays, from 11am - 4pm or by appointment. This show will exhibit through September 30th.
