Jennifer Bain

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My new work is a translation of the emotional states I’ve experienced after relocating from California to New Mexico, to an altered lifestyle as a recent widow. I’ve paid close attention to the shifts in my energy and consciousness created by these changes. 

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The landscape of New Mexico influences my painterly space and the forms I use. The paintings reveal the layers and mysteries of the land and skies, where the distant mountain ranges read as flat shapes with hard and soft edges, presenting simultaneously an unfathomable illusion of depth and lack of depth. Shifting light sources from clouds and high altitude create implausible colors, and an odd or indiscernible focal point. 

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Buried forms and deep cut, scrubby lines compete for dominance on the surface, while multiple layers of under painting and drawing, erased and redrawn, create the platform for my translation of experience. The act of erasing creates a window into a world in motion, not unlike my own present interior. 

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Like a skin, the multiple layers underneath define the paintings’ surfaces: interweaving squiggles and partially erased, soft-edged forms reveal layers of colors, where every inch is filled. Through this palimpsest of colored layers, my impressions of California’s coastal lands are exposed, braiding time and place in memory. 

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The layers of marks, forms and textures in these paintings suggest time. Like the forms hidden within layers, the emotional content of the work, suggested in the titles, can only be fleetingly glimpsed. As I work, I uncover, or discover, obscured experiences, illuminating the process of being in the present while gazing back to the past.