Tag: Painting

Open Studios, November 23-24

Jen

You are cordially invited to visit with me at the Brickbottom Artists Open Studios event, this weekend, November 23 and 24, 12-5 PM each day.

Yes, I’m actually coming out of my house! I’ve been doing so much work that I decided to make one of my rare public appearances to show it off and tell people all about it. I’ll be displaying medium and small works on canvas, small works on paper, journaling/note cards, and tiny micro-zines, and I’ll be happy to answer questions and engage in sociable chit-chat.

Get event info here: Brickbottom.org.

Behold! A selection of the art I’m bringing to the event.

jfries-abstract-landscape-12-4.8.24-copy
jfries-abstract-landscape-9
JFries Doll's House 2-page spread
JFries The Sins of Icarus open view
JFries Les Madeleines de Commercy
JFries lake study 4 7.2020

Meet and Greet the Artist

Technically, I’m not literally opening my studio. I’ve been a member of the Brickbottom Artists Association of Somerville since 2020, but I only live near, not in, the physical Brickbottom Artists Buildings. I’m what we call an Affiliate Member. (Though, to be honest, I’m really freaking close, just a few streets away.) So I am bringing my studio to you, thanks to a kind and generous resident who is hosting several Affiliates for this year’s event.

I’ll have pieces for exhibition and pieces for sale, and I’ll be there to say hi, chat you up, answer all your questions great and small, and generally make myself pleasant.

Start Your Holiday Shopping Early

This is a great chance to exploit my fever of experimentation, as I will be showing a wide selection of small artworks and handmade cards for mailing or journaling, all very easy to buy, carry home, and gift to loved ones or yourself.

Works on canvas are ready to hang. Art Books and micro-zines can take you on amazing journeys, as books do. Mini paintings can adorn any desk, wall, cork board, or table, easily. And journaling and note cards are the ideal chance to embrace Art as Lifestyle, with original, unique abstract paintings designed for work as journaling cards, bookmarks, or note cards.

Hand-painted abstracts for journaling, writing, or display.

Business Stuff

If you’d like to buy some of my art, please be advised I’m accepting cash only at the event.

Yes, I know, it’s terribly backward of me, but I do so few of these events that it would actually be less efficient to set up a system to process credit cards.

But I realize it’s inconvenient for many of you, so you can also buy art online, right now or any time between now and the end of the event on Sunday evening.

If there’s any art on this site you particularly like, email me, and I’ll let you know if it’s available and for what price. You can buy it online before the weekend and pick it up from me in person at the Brickbottom.

The journaling cards are $15 each, or buy three and get a fourth card free.

Be sure to ask me about any other special offers as well as ongoing or future projects on the event days.

Hope to see you there!

-Jen

Meet & Greet Event: Yart Sale

Jen

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.

Preview:

Spring time signs of life – new art and new directions

Jen

Hi, all. Hope you’re doing well. Spring is literally just around the corner, with the Vernal Equinox next Tuesday, March 19. I’m very excited about it because it’s been a windy late winter here in lovely Massachusetts, and I live and work in a creaky, old, 1870s triple-decker. Locals will know what that means. I am tired of being cold. Granted, we could have a freeze as late as May because New England, but I cling to the straws I find.

I have two new paintings to share. Behold!

Wind and clouds with gull, watercolor and collage

Dogwood buds with junco, watercolor and ink

These are both views from my studio window, originally sketched on the same day, at about 11:00 AM. They will be added to the Artrepreneur shop shortly.

They’re also both experiments in mounting watercolors on canvas. Painting watercolor on canvas is tricky. You have to treat the canvas with a specially mixed primer, called watercolor ground, but honestly, I don’t love it. I like my work to look and even feel a certain way, and watercolor ground is just not the surface texture I want. Plus, watercolor on ground is fragile. For me personally, it’s a lot of prep work for a substrate that’s not very stable, for a medium meant for a different surface. Many artists do amazing things with it, but it’s not my resonance.

But then I had one of my “Hey, wait a minute, Jen” thoughts. Don’t I build collages on canvas all the time?, I said to myself. Why yes, I do, now that you mention it, I said back to myself. So why don’t I mount some paper on some canvas and then paint on it? Duh!

So I’ve been experimenting.

Wind and Clouds with Gull is watercolor, gansai, pastel, pencils, and collage on rice paper on canvas.

Dogwood Buds with Junco is watercolor, gansai, pastel and ink on drawing paper on canvas.

More experiments are upcoming with other papers and media. I think this is going to be a regular thing. I really like it. The wheat paste I make for collage shrinks in drying, tightening up the canvas like a drum. Maybe I’ll make a video of it, so you can hear it. It results in a gorgeously flat surface with no buckling or cockling, and a finished work that’s ready to frame and hang. I can’t think why I never thought to use this for painting and drawing before. Silly me.

Anyway, that was the first big breakthrough of 2024.

I suppose the fact that they are paintings is kind of also a breakthrough. Collage is and always will be the most direct glimpse into how my brain works, but there’s actually a practical problem-solving reason why I am doing more mark-making work. I’ll write about that in future.

Other practical problems that need solving are being addressed this year as well. Watch this space for adjustments to the Newsletter and the Patreon, both of which will continue to be free, so you should totally sign up for them. There will also be new ways to acquire original, bespoke, Jen Fries artworks of your very own, so brace for joy on that front.

An Alchemy of Dragons will be undergoing some renovations, too. It turns out that writing a serialized novel is kind of like producing a reality series about a fictional series in which the characters build a suspension bridge, for which you actually build a suspension bridge. I’m bringing in co-protagonist Iarius Venzo as well as at least one subplot, and I’ve been quite literally at the engineering drawing board, because, you know, you can’t just do the thing. You can’t just sploop it out onto the internet. You have to build, design, construct – like a collage. Or a Werner Herzog movie.

I’ll write about that process in the near future, too.

Anyway… Spring!

-Jen

The Month that was November

Jen

I have been writing, arting, businessing, and planning, and you’re going to have to take my word for it because I forgot to do the updating (and several other -ings as well).

But no, for real, did the things. I drew. I painted and collaged. I experimented with some still raw, in-the-seed ideas. I wrote and illustrated. I prepped several projects. I did a secret thing I’m not going to talk about yet.

I just didn’t mention any of it to you guys. The Communications division of me is feeling a bit exasperated with the Studio division of me. 

Oh, well, I’m telling you now. Let’s get into the update.

An Alchemy of Dragons

As you know, Chapter 6 was posted earlier this month. Read it here.

Chapter 7 is about half written so far. Here’s a glimpse into the current draft:

The first tone of the concert seemed to rise from the Bard of Perna’s fingers of its own accord, tight, hard, building tension until it broke into an arabesque of notes sparkling through the air like the sunlight itself.

He let the passage fade into silence, then repeated, and with it, the Lady of Arrak rose and began to dance. His music and her movements were relaxed and breezy. Her veils floated and subtly slipped away, exposing slender bare arms, then a hint of a colorful bodice, all grace and tender gestures

November Art Highlights

Studies for seasonal paintings.


Illustrations for Alchemy Chapter 6 were posted.


Studio Assistant Princess LunaLynx posed for a photo shoot.


“I have traveled far to share this with you,” collage postcard with asemic writing. This was a mark-making exercise, related to a workshop idea in development. It resulted in a two-sided art object and an examination of my creative process.

And I have a question for you!

Little by little, I’m organizing my online realm and figuring out how all the knobs and buttons work. The next phase is to integrate all the parts of the Jen Fries Arts Community, i.e. all you wonderful folks who subscribe or follow in the various ways. I’m going to be tweaking some features of the website and adding some more ways for us to interact, but I need to plan which skills to learn and gear to acquire next.

I would love to get some guidance from you via the form below. Let me know what you’d like me to develop for our little circle, and I’ll see what I can do about it.

Go back

Your message has been sent

Choose the features you’d enjoy as a member of the JFA Community. Select all that apply.


Thanks!

– Jen

Traveling inside my head: Abstract Landscapes

Jen

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?

Gray Light and Working Cozy

Jen1 Comment
JFries snow branches border

It’s been all snow, ice, mellow jazz in the background, warm soft clothes with big fluffy scarves, bird watching, art puttering, and spiced chai with cream since last I posted. In keeping with February in Massachusetts, my view has been largely inward – spring cleaning the junk inside my head as well as in my rooms, and avoiding the freezing damp. I hope you are all keeping well and warm, despite storms and craziness.

I’ve been working on a new-to-me water-media technique, using soft pastels like watercolor. I started doing this on small sketches sometime last year, and it was kind of a breakthrough for me. The graininess of pastel pigments gives the paintings a subtle, impressionistic texture compared to watercolor. There’s a dreamy effect that I’m falling in love with. Plus wet pastel adheres to the paper well, as long as you don’t lay it on too thick or in too many layers. No dust floating off.

For tiny drawings in my sketchbook, I just lift color off the stick with a wet brush, treating the sticks like pan watercolors. However, the pastels won’t flow as freely across a surface, so for larger paintings and washes I need to experiment a bit.

Some artists grind pastels to powder and mix them with additives and binders to make them into proper paints. I’m way too lazy for that. But then I thought a stick of color is rather like a stick of ink, isn’t it, so I turned to Chinese and Japanese brush painting, for which solid ink is ground with water on a stone to make liquid ink of the desired consistency. This monochrome study of branches was done by grinding a pastel stick in that manner.

JFries branches 2.2021
Inspired by the dogwood outside my window

I am quite pleased with this method so far. It suits me. The grinding provides a meditative moment to get into the head space. I need to work on the mis-en-place arrangement of tools, play with colors, put together an equipment kit, and so forth. I’ll keep you posted on progress. Meanwhile, this small painting will be available in the shop shortly, along with other works that put me in mind of the season.

That’s all for now. Remember your masks and all that, and take care of yourselves.

January/February Photo Journal

JFries snow dogwood 2.2021
The dogwood
JFries worktable 2.2021
Getting ready, this time to make the new sketchbook
sm JFries SA Scipio 2.2021
Staff meeting with Studio Assistant Scipio
JFries doves in snow 2.2021
Meeting members of the wildlife division for lunch
JFries snow street 2.2021
The view from the studio for the past several weeks