Time again for the most relaxed art fair event of the year. If you are in or near Somerville, MA, come tour the front porches and yards of the city’s artists. I’ll be showing a selection of works in a warm-season, nature-focused theme, with at least one new idea I’ve been playing around with.
The event is one day, Saturday, August 8, from 12 – 6 pm. Rain date, Sunday, August 9. The weather’s been iffy, but it seems to be clearing up. However, if we get rained out, contact me through this site if you’d like to arrange alternative viewing. I have no idea what that would mean, but we can work something out.
Winter is a season of challenge and rest. It’s a time of stark beauty, quiet light, and endless space. In winter, we see right down to the fundamentals of things, and we make the most of what we’ve learned the rest of the year. Winter is the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. Here are some paintings and collages, celebrating this season of contrasts. Happy Holidays!
It has a kooky name, but it’s a fun event. In Somerville’s city-wide Yart Sale, Saturday, August 10th, the local arts community open up their yards and front porches for impromptu art exhibitions and sales. It’s a relaxed way to get to know your more boho neighbors, soak up the culture of Our Fair City, and maybe pick up something beautiful for your home or a gift. I’ll be participating again this year, showing new and favorite works.
Rain is predicted, but the forecasts so far think it will clear out well before noon on Saturday, so we should be good to go. Just in case, the rain date is Sunday, 8/11.
Visit the Somerville Arts Council Yart Sale page for event details and an interactive online map of all the participants, HERE.
I will be on my porch, 12:00 to 6:00PM, with a short break at around 3:00.
I’ll be showing paintings and collages, artist books, and tiny art that’s great for bookmarks, journaling, and notecards. If you will be in the Somerville area this weekend, do stop by for a meet-and-greet.
Happy Vernal Equinox Day! I thought I’d celebrate the season with a selection of some new and older works on the seasonal theme. No explanations. Not in any particular order. Comments and questions are welcome.
Three new abstracts I made this fall. Let’s take a walk through them.
Abstract Landscape 8
Watercolor and ink, half painting, half monotype print, 5 x 7 inches. I printed Prussian blue over a dilute Prussian wash, then incised color with a palette knife. It’s one of my more purely abstracted things, but you know me – I can’t really do abstracts. To me, this small painting suggests city lights reflected in water.
Abstract Landscape 9
Watercolor and ink. 9 x 12 inches. Definitely a seascape, to my eye, winter, the surf viewed through dried grasses. What do you think?
Abstract Landscape 10
Mixed media – watercolor, pastel, and collage, 12 x 9 inches. In this one, I altered the original abstract watercolor to pick out the image I saw in it – a pine forest, full of mist pierced by light.
My series of abstract landscapes get at the heart of my creative practice. They’re about following and exploring, not directing the process. They’re about finding the images that resonate most naturally with me, like a kind of Rorschach test to reveal how I see the world.
These three works will be in my shop in a couple of days.
Also coming up, Chapter 4 of An Alchemy of Dragons, and a gift for all of you, connected to a Yuletide painting in progress.
Pareidolia is the tendency to see specific, meaningful images in random or ambiguous patterns.
I like to pick out order from chaos. And I like to go a-wandering, and find random things of meaning.
Uncontrollable media like water are good for me because the randomness breaks my perfectionism. They force me to cede some control and to find a rapport with accidental occurrences and effects. They make me listen and look. Rather than obsessively planning every detail of an artwork – and I can get real obsessive – by following the movements of fluid media, I feel like I am receiving art brought to me by the universe.
It seems the universe brings me a lot of landscapes. I guess I have nature on the brain.
Here are four new abstract landscapes in watercolor, all 9 x 5.75 inches. In all of them, I randomly messed about with paint, water, brushes and tools, and then considered the results from various angles to find the views that emerged in the drying. Two of them work so well in different orientations that, rather than pick one, I signed them on all the sides I liked.
Maybe a seascape – waves on a beach? I enjoy the play of color and the storminess of it.
Definitely a seascape. Is there a figure, perhaps walking along a sandbar at low tide?
Two for one. In one orientation, it’s rolling hills, with perhaps a pond, and distant buildings. In another orientation, it’s a forest.
Abstract Landscape 4a, b, c, d. Four! Count ‘em – four coherent images on one piece of paper. I see a sort of darkening, perhaps twilight, marshy view, then a forest, then heavy rain over what might be a farmhouse, and finally another forest view.
Drop a comment and let me know where these images take you. And how do you feel when something random – a cloud, a pattern of light through curtains, whatever it may be – suddenly connects with you and tells a story?
This one is about the gifts the universe sends us, the treasures we pass by on the road.
The moon was particularly beautiful over Somerville last night, when the storm clouds parted. It was bright enough to light my room, overcoming the street lamps. The wet air smelled of spring.
By the way, we call April’s moon the Pink Moon, not because it looks pink, but because it’s the month for pinks, the flower, to bloom. Indeed, my city is filling up with flowers now.
I repurposed one of my blue landscapes for this collage. Sometimes an image has more to say, and I will often revisit older pieces that seem like they want to go in a different direction. In fact, I won’t let go of a piece until I’m sure it is what it wants to be.
I can hardly believe it has been about three months since my last update, but as most of you know, I tend to fall off the planet fairly regularly. I don’t apologize for it. When I have crap to work through that’s irrelevant to anyone else, I just do it without showing it to anyone. But finally, I do have news to share.
New work on exhibit this summer
“Sometimes the neighbors are up all night,” collage and acrylic on paper.
And sings the tune without the words…
This new work is inspired by our local wild birds, whose songs frequently echo through the streets at night, when all else is relatively quiet. I find the birds’ nightlife deeply reassuring. Even in something as small as a bird singing in the dark, we are reminded that we share a living and lively world. The collage is 7 x 10 inches, and made with copies of vintage images, bars of music randomly sliced from Stravinsky’s “The Firebird Suite,” my own blue landscape in acrylic paste, and a line from Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing With Feathers.”
It’s part of the summer show at the Brickbottom Gallery, “The Great Outdoors,” running July 15 – August 14, 2021. Visit the Brickbottom website at This Link for details.
A Cat
Allow me to introduce Luna Lynx, Lady Silvertip, our new cat and studio assistant.
“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” – Jean Cocteau
She has been with us about a month and is still in studio orientation, but has taken the job of House Cat well in hand. According to the good folks at Animal Rescue League of Boston, although very young herself, she had just weaned off a litter of kittens before coming to us. I believe she has transferred her maternal instincts to her two new humans. Luna Lynx is extremely attentive, playful and nurturing. She scolds us if we wander off, makes sure we eat on time and get our exercise, and checks on us in our beds at night.
I’m grateful because we have needed someone to take care of us these past few sad months. With her to get us up and running, I feel like we can finally start to move again and that the winter – and all of last year, really – is over at last.
Finally, watch this space for upcoming projects and a new online shop system, coming soon.
This has been a difficult winter for us at the apartment attached to the studio. I’ll tell you about it at some future date. For now, suffice to say, we are dealing with unhappy things, and the least of my troubles is that my nearly decade-old Mac computer finally broke down. I write this on a loaner PC (thanks, Mom), and due to various techly things I’m not coping with right now, I can’t upload any of my new photos to prove that I’ve actually been doing stuff. So… whatever. On the scale of things, the computer is annoying because it doesn’t matter, but it does interrupt.
I’ve been working on paper sculptures of eggs and rabbits, naturally, because yay-spring. Also working on my occult detective novel – again. And that one ambitious project. They’re all coming along rather nicely. I wish I could show them to you.
Instead, I’m adding some spring-ly works to the Shop, beginning with four small landscape paintings, the Blue Lakes. They are kind of misty and moody, and they speak both to my state of mind and the time of year. I used paste-paint on paper and improvised with folds, blots, pulls, and mark-making. In some you can spot finger impressions, creases, and other flaws helping to build the image of a watery landscape.
The Blue Lakes Series
Every so often this March, look for more paintings and collages to the Shop, in celebration of the season.
Someone I admire recently observed that creative work is therapeutic. It takes one out of oneself. It’s true. These past few weeks, the meditative ASMR of my pen on the paper, and the brush applying layers of paste and paper, and birds jumping around in the tree by my window has been my refuge. Engaging all my senses in my materials – the textures, sounds, smells, colors – making adjustments as I go along, not overthinking things but just floating in the process – it’s pretty much the only thing that lets me forget my cares for a while, lets me feel just free and existing.
It doesn’t last, but the work is always there, waiting, anytime I need a break. There’s a life-lesson there, after this traumatic year. If you have something that gets your mind off yourself, that feeds your senses, and leaves you with something positive at the end of the day or hour, indulge in it. It’s medicine, and we all need it, as surely as we need a vaccine.
Jen Fries Arts 