Tag: Small paintings

Finding Magic: a winter small works series

Jen

How to stay hopeful when it all gets to be just too much seems to be the question of the day, at least among the Youtubers and pundits I follow. How to weather the slings and arrows, pick yourself up and dust yourself off, and all that.

Well, honestly, I’ve always been too bloody-minded to lose hope for very long. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of dark nights, but I get too angry at the effrontery of upstarts to meekly accept whatever they want my fate to be. To me, hope has never been the thing with feathers fluttering in the deep recesses of the heart. Rather, it’s the thing that spits out a bloody tooth and wades back into the fight for another round.

Life has been a real fight lately, hasn’t it? We’ve all been well and truly in it, and there’s no end in sight. Here at the house attached to the studio, we’ve been dealing with medical crises and all the attendant crises that come along with needing urgent help. Don’t worry, it’s working out. Life was saved. Sickness was cured. Needed work is being done. But this past month has been scary and exhausting and expensive, recovery and caring are not yet finished, and neglected work, home, garden, etc., knocked into the proverbial cocked hat by personal disaster, are demanding to get back on the agenda. Time is ready to march on even if I’m not.

So, when all has fallen into confusion, when I’m hopelessly behind on every task, exhausted to the point that I can’t even sleep, and the 10,000 things rush to fill every hour of the day, I open my eyes and look for the patterns in the chaos. This is what I call magic. To find the hidden structures that reveal the sense of it all. Thus I orient myself, ground and center myself, and gradually regain control of my reality.

Art and storytelling are my arcane methods for that.

I cast spells to shine clear lights on dark things, draw boundaries, invoke powers, steer and shape energies, and explore mysteries – until I feel pulled together enough to stand stably on my feet again.

And this year, because we’re all really going through it, I’m sharing my magical explorations with all of you. From now through at least New Year – maybe to spring, I’ll see how it goes – I present “Finding Magic,” a small works series celebrating the winter months of 2025-2026.

Talismans and amulets, tiny things to accent a threshold or guard a book. Symbols of power, resilience, prosperity, emotions. Worlds in the palm of your hand. Portals to other realms. Small wishes to bring good things into challenging times.

In the northern hemisphere, where I live, winter is the season for new beginnings, containing as it does not one but four new years – the solar new year of the winter solstice, the astronomical new year at the close of the calendar, the planetary new year at Earth’s perihelion, and the lunar new year in February. It’s a season for resting and resetting, for looking back and ahead, for personal transformations, for the quiet inner work of healing and growth.

With “Finding Magic,” I invite you to come along with me as I do that work for myself and offer what I find to you.

There seems to be a trend – or I’d like there to be a trend – of artists celebrating the end of the year with affordable small works series to tell the story of the year that was. “Finding Magic” is about pulling ourselves together to wade back into the fight next year, stronger, refreshed, clear-eyed, and empowered.

It will be all small items in various media, priced for any budget at under $50 and under $100 depending on the piece. Follow this site for updates as new pieces are finished.

Jen Fries, Eye Amulets, pastel, watercolor, and ink on paper, roughly life-sized, $25 each, part of “Finding Magic.” Display, carry, use for ornament, journaling, or to ward off unwelcome pests and gossips. Email me if interested.

And if you happen to be in the Boston, Massachusetts, area this weekend, stop by the Brickbottom building in Somerville for our Open Studios event, November 22-23, 12-6pm. Info here. I’ll be in Unit C322, showing the first of the “Finding Magic” pieces along with larger works on similar themes.

Limited palette: abstract watercolors in April

Jen

Three new small paintings. These abstract landscapes express the light and weather of spring, using Prussian blue, yellow ochre, and burnt siena. I enjoy tonalism and limited palettes. I like to select some variation on the primary colors, or even just one color – Prussian blue is a favorite. The limitation does an end-run around my over-thinking and perfectionism and lets me get kind of Zen with light, shadow, and mood. It’s a liberating restriction.

jfries-branches-4.8.24-copy
jfries-abstract-landscape-12-4.8.24-copy
jfries-abstract-landscape-10-4.8.24-copy

Happy Year of the Wood Dragon 2024

Jen
A dragon in a thicket, An Alchemy of Dragons, Ch. 2


Happy lunar new year, everyone! I hope your winter has been cozy and all is well with you and yours as the Year-Beginning Season comes to its close.

I love that the universe gives us three chances to start every new year over the whole winter. We get the solar new year at the Winter Solstice, the astronomical new year at Earth’s perihelion in the first week of January, and now the lunar new year, which was celebrated yesterday.

Considering how dragged out many of us were in December and January, getting to count February as an additional start is especially welcome.

However, proceed with caution. 2024 is the year of the dragon, which is a double-edged sword. If you were born in a dragon year, it’s all good, but if you were born under a different sign, you’d better check your auspices. Rabbit-year folks like me, for instance, are advised to look both ways crossing the street, stay out of fights, take our vitamins, and generally behave like smart little bunnies.

I’ve checked Chinese astrology, western astrology, and western numerology, and overall, they all promise a year of great change and a mixed bag of challenges and opportunities. So … yeah, looking at what’s on our plates already, buckle up, kids. It’s going to be a ride.

That’s why I chose the illustration above as my greeting to you. That dragon was in quite the tangle in An Alchemy of Dragons, Ch. 2, but our protagonist, Erran, was able to use the brambles to make his escape. In real life, thickets are nurseries where new forests are born. They offer traps for some and havens for others. Little critters who learn the ins and outs are safe in there. They can find everything they need – food, water, shelter – and come and go as they please. Blundering clods like hunters, on the other hand, can barely get in, and if they force their way, they’ll have a job getting out again.

I think that’s appropriate for this year.

I’m sure you noticed that it’s been another while since you heard from me. I’m doing the stuff, but I can’t quite decide how I want to present it to you.

New small paintings are coming to the shop soon.

I’ve been reworking the structure of the Alchemy of Dragons serial, which may require adding material and reorganizing the chapters again, but I am very pleased with what I’ve got. I had been using the wrong plotting system, and the deeper into the story I got, the harder it was to plan what should come next in the telling of it. Putting together a system that works for me became my main winter project, and I feel like I’m on a much better track now. I’m as optimistic as I ever get.

Video and audio experiments are also in progress. Watch this space for further news on those.

Finally, just about all my online tools need refreshing. Figuring out the best options is an ongoing puzzle. There will be tweaks to the website arrangement, the newsletter, Patreon, and subscriptions. Nothing shocking, but hopefully some functional improvements, like my writing system.

I have a feeling a lot of us have been gnawing things over in our burrows all this winter, but the celestial clocks have turned, and the new season is just about here. Yes, in damp, icy Massachusetts, we just got another winter storm advisory for next week, but the days are undeniably longer and brighter. Buds are developing on trees, the backyard birds are already starting to sing and pair up, and I started spring cleaning today.

So Happy New Year!

– Jen, a rabbit in a dragon year.

-Jen

New Abstract Landscapes

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.

jfries-abstract-landscape-8

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?

jfries-abstract-landscape-9

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.

jfries-abstract-landscape-10

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.

Hammer & Tongs: New Paintings, New Words, and a Secret Project

Jen

Busy, busy, busy in the studio.

June is one of those times, isn’t it? It’s a quarter month, when the year takes another turn. The summer solstice is – checks calendar – Tuesday. Already! Omg. Things are happening. The garden is blooming, bees all over the place, beans shooting up. The baby birds are flying. I can’t help but keep moving, too.

Three new small paintings are in the Shop now. Two abstract landscapes and one representative image of the moon over my street at 2:00 in the morning. I’ve been working late a lot. See below, and Shop here.

My second ever poem to be released in public is up. Titled “Spilled Ink,” it tells the story of the painting of Abstract Landscape 6, and I think something more as well. Read it here.

An Alchemy of Dragons continues in progress. The beginning is the most daunting part of an adventure, don’t you think? It’s the first and potentially most fatal test of one’s competence. I have to start a key set of wheels turning in these first chapters, and I admit, it’s taking longer to get it right than I’d hoped. But I think it will be worth it. Aiming for July on that one. Be sure to sign up for the Newsletter for alerts when chapters are posted.

Finally, I’ve taken on a new project, a commission, which will stay a secret for now. It’s pretty big. I have no idea how long it will take to finish. I will post hints and progress reports as I go.

It’s actually a bit intimidating when I list it all out like this. It’s all been happening in just the past few weeks. Sometimes, I don’t even feel the pace of work, like the dizzying speed of the Earth’s rotation, and I have no idea where I am in my To-Do list, just as I have no innate sense of where I am on the planet. I’m just here, now, doing whatever I’m doing – painting, drawing, writing, business, gardening, house stuff, people stuff, world stuff, giving a freaking interview for crying out loud, making good on commitments, oy-geez.

Maybe I just need to put my nose back down on its comfy grindstone and avoid that big-picture perspective thing for a while.

Three new small works:

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?

Blue Lakes and the solace of creating

Jen

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

  • JFries lake study 3 7.2020
  • JFries lake study 2 7.2020
  • JFries lake study 1 7.2020
  • JFries lake study 4 7.2020

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.

Take care and take it easy, everyone.

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