Mixed Media – Jen Fries Arts

Happy Lunar New Year! First Art of 2023

January 22, 2023 Jen

Happy Year of the Water Rabbit, on the Chinese lunar calendar!

This morning, I finished my first art of the year, “Rabbit and Moon” (working title; I may change it).

It’s about 9 x 12 inches, on paper, mixed media – watercolor, graphite, and ink. The asemic writing in the upper right corner is actually my real, gloriously illegible handwriting, turned on its end. This time I’m quoting Robert Frost, a line from “Mending Wall” (1914):

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding
to please the yelping dogs

In the verse containing that line, Frost talks about going out in spring with his neighbor to repair the damage that happens to their boundary wall over the winter, including the vandalism of hunters who knock down the stones to flush out their prey, because “they would have the rabbit out of hiding.” (Click here for the full text, off-site.)

That poem also gives us the famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost’s neighbor repeats that saying, and the poet Frost wonders why good neighbors need fences at all. Shouldn’t they be able to rely on their mutual understanding?

Myself, I’m a little on the fence about that (har-har), but I do appreciate that, even though Frost might not like the barrier between people, by mending the wall, he’s evening the odds for the rabbits.

Jumping back from West to East, Chinese astrology says that the Water Rabbit brings in peaceful, patient, and creative energies and encourages us to rely on our inner wisdom and trust our instincts. We should approach this year’s challenges calmly and rationally, and be kind and considerate to each other and to ourselves.

Water Rabbit Year 2023 could turn out to be all about good neighbors – having them and being them. Just remember that the barriers that delineate our personal boundaries are best when everyone finds safety in them – us and the rabbits.

New Abstract Landscapes

December 7, 2022 Jen

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.

Studio News: Exhibition: Dark Tales, Familiars and Objects of Divination

October 29, 2022December 7, 2022 Jen

My assemblage, Augury, is included in the autumn exhibition in the Inside-Out Gallery outside the CVS at Davis Square, Somerville. See it there, because it will be seeing you. Happy Halloween!

“Dark Tales, Familiars, and Objects of Divination” is presented by Inside-Out Gallery and Somerville Arts Council and will run through November.

Augury, mixed media assemblage.

New Work: April Moon

April 17, 2022 Jen2 Comments

Rabbit in moonlight
Moths dance
Returning home

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.

Happy Spring, all.

-Jen

Virtual Gallery: Construction/Deconstruction is online

May 23, 2020 Jen

The Brickbottom Artists Association exhibition, “Construction/Deconstruction,” is now up in full online. Please enjoy!

The Brickbottom Gallery here in Somerville was forced to close to the public due to the pandemic, but my fellow artists did a fantastic job establishing our first virtual gallery. Our annual spring show is extended into the summer.

Click here to view the full exhibition at www.Brickbottom.org.

My contribution, “Pink Yarrow,” reconstructs flowers from my urban garden from the dried remains of the actual plants.

Keep Calm and Carry On

April 13, 2020 Jen

The exhibition “Construction/Deconstruction” at the Brickbottom Gallery in Somerville is moving ahead, and so am I. With the kind help of some fellow artists with a car, my new piece, “Pink Yarrow,” made it to the gallery with proper physical distancing observed at all times.

The show will be presented online, so watch this site for further updates.

A new project starts tomorrow. For now, please enjoy a sneak peak at “Pink Yarrow,” part of the Botanicals series, made with actual pink yarrows from last year’s garden, restored to their summer colors.

Come Sail Away…

September 17, 2019January 14, 2020 Jen2 Comments

I must admit to a failure of time management when, surfacing happy from deep immersion in work, I find the entire summer has slipped by without a word from me to the wider world. Oops. Let’s say I’ve been on a summer artist’s retreat. Yeah, that works.

So, I’m back from my summer artist’s retreat, during which quite a lot of things have happened, haven’t they? (Looks at wider world; considers returning to the retreat.) Anyway…

Highlights:

I built a boat. And a cloth doll. My first of each. This was a commission for toys illustrating a children’s story. I blew my labor budget experimenting with materials and techniques, but it was worth it. The client is happy, and it spawned a gaggle of project bunnies along the way.

I enrolled in a dollhouse workshop taught by Laetitia Miéral, a paper artist in France. Her work is beautiful, and she’s an excellent teacher. You must check her out at Merveilles en Papier. I heartily recommend her workshops for both beginners and more advanced artists. She offers both big and small projects, great techniques, and is outstanding at getting her students (or at least me) past perfectionism and commitment phobias.

Appropriately, I worked on dollhouses, too. I either solved a problem with the novel or created a new one – not sure yet. I wrote an essay on magic and reality – release date TBD. I hand-bound sketchbooks and journals, observed wildlife, gardened like a maniac, and did a lot of thinking.

And suddenly, it’s September. Break’s over.

Spring is here!

March 18, 2019January 14, 2020 Jen

Spring starts this Wednesday, March 20! The trees are budding. The first green shoots are showing through winter’s litter. The birds and animals are setting up house. The sun is higher and warmer, and everything seems full of energy and movement.

I celebrated by making my annual mistake of cleaning my rooms. I learned that I don’t need any more clothes or hair ties, my cats don’t need any more toys, and the only things that are ever truly lost are the ones that are a big pain to replace. I didn’t even do the Kondo method, and I’m overwhelmed – but motivated afresh.

Experiments with monoprint continue, and I’ve started a small set of collages on paper using natural botanical bits. This first one is a tribute to the season and our city rabbits down by the Mystic estuary. It belongs to my ongoing series about walks around town.

JFries Charlestown Spring in progress 3.15.19

Roofing and the joy of faux finishes

April 17, 2018January 14, 2020 Jen

Hello, all. It’s been a while. Things have been kind of crazy, y’know, the way they get. Anyway, I have been extremely busy with work and planning and organizing and birding and politics and preparing for gardening, and through it all, I have been shingling the dollhouse roof.

I’m going for the look of slate, and I hope you’ll think I got close. It’s been some fun on the Google, first looking up what slate generally looks like, then how to fake it with paint, then what slate roofs in particular look like, then how to build a slate roof, and from there deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of roofing, skylights and all that sort of jazz.

The following images show some of what I came up with. I painted more manila folders with a small-scale slate effect and others with a copper effect, because slate or other stone tile roofs will often have metal flashing and gutters at their seams, and those will sometimes be made of copper, according to my admittedly superficial research. I went more for look than structural accuracy. In my defense, my neighbor, who is a roofer, says this is pretty much correct. I find it relaxing and fun to cover sheets of paper with faux paint effects. I’m not sure what that says about me as a person, but it would suck if I didn’t enjoy it, as I need to do a lot of it.

These photos are couple of weeks old, and more progress has been made since they were taken. The work is going quickly at this point, which makes it hard to take a break for blog updates. It is about time I began work on the characters who will play out their drama in this house, as well as the furnishings and props, too.

By the way, the blog’s new background photo is a shot I took of a tree on my street, against a wet, gray sky, the bare branches just getting knobby with their first buds. Springtime in New England!

Mystery House has a color at last

April 1, 2018January 14, 2020 Jen

It’s yellow for Spring time!

These past weeks I’ve been working very hard on the dollhouse for my mystery graphic novel project. There were a couple of setbacks since January. I decided the acetate windows would not work for photography, so I had to cut them out and replace the mullion bars with toothpicks. Next, I realized the second floor is too dark to see into if the back roof/gable panel is in place, so I dithered for some time about how to fix that problem. But finally, all that was done, and today I put color on the exterior walls.

As you see, I went with a sunny yellow, which will be complemented by colors on the gingerbread ornaments still to come. Next, I will tile the roof, for which I painted card stock to look like slate. You can see a hint of that, dry-fitted with tape, in one of the photos.

As with most labor-intensive projects, it’s amazing how suddenly real progress can appear, and after months of slogging, the thing looks like it will soon be finished. It’s quite energizing.

Yellow dollhouse, north side and back, in progress.