jennyarntzen.art

  Graphite, pencil crayon, acrylic paint on mylar 6" x 6" My great enjoyment with drawing and painting is the surprise I feel when I step back and see what happened at the end of a session at my art desk.  Every time I pick up a pencil, a pen, a brush or a scraper feels like the first time. Every time I touch the surface with my mark making implement I must let go of assumptions, expectations, and perfection. I feel the energy of this mysterious creative drive to flow through me, I suspend my anxious need for control long enough to let the mark make itself. I use layers to build the image, a subject on a ground. With each layer I pretend it is the first layer strive to bring a kind of truth to each pass across the image.  The materials I use reflect the circumstances of my production. These are materials that can be used on a small art desk tucked away in the 'living room' of my basement suite and also, I have created my auxilliary desk up in the attic. I can't ma...

  Mylar, graphite, pencil crayon, acrylic paint - 6" x 6" There are significant differences between the billions of digital photographs we consume every day across social media platforms and the singular hand-made images we create and gift or sell from our art desks. The work of capturing a digital photograph involves a picture of contemporaneous events. The work of creating a hand-made image involves materials, processes and time-based techniques inspired by mystery. Sometimes it is hard to understand why anyone would take the time and effort to make a hand-made image when so many digital images are instantly available. I am thinking about these differences in three areas: appreciation, agency, and relationship. There is a difference in the way we appreciate digital photographs and hand-made images. We can understand appreciation in terms of the length of time we spend appreciating the image. Digital photographs flood our media feeds. We spend seconds to comprehend the cont...

  Well, I am hopeful. And I love the work I am doing. We are ok for today and I am going to keep plowing ahead on my modest initiatives. I'm not on a path to wealth. I am on a path to serenity. That is all I need. Hopefully I will leave something behind that can help improve the outcome for humanity on this planet. That is all I can do with the life I have been given.

  Graphite, pencil crayon, ink, acrylic paint on mylar - 8 1/4" x 6" Everyday I walk in nature. Nature as structured by roads, sidewalks, municipal authority, parks board, residential property. Nature abiding in the sunrise, seasonal change, clouds and water sheds. Nature alive in budding branches, daffodils, snow drops and crocus blossoms. Nature embodied in my curious neighbour crows. I walk in nature and it reflects back to me something about myself. Something that I need to know about myself that I can only see in the natural world as I interpret natural phenomena in relation to my own experience of life in this moment. My interpretation may be literal, the sun is rising and my spirits rise with it. My interpretation may be metaphorical, I see the dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk and I see a way forward despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles. My interpretation may be allegorical, I see crows sitting side by side on a telephone wire and I tell stories t...

 Mylar, pencil crayon, pen, acrylic and ink I'm thinking about the ecological integrity of a natural landscape and what it means to be a human and also be part of that landscape. I'm fascinated by relationships and how my own experience and knowledge of the world is in a state of constant co-creation with my surroundings.  I live a fairly solitary and simple life these days. Looking after Mom structures my days and the possibilities of how I may express my creativity.  My creativity is my process of sense-making, of making sense of what I am experiencing. My experiences are a endlessly inflected by my personal, and also my social and cultural history. These histories - the stories my life - are contradictory, baffling, and confusing. The stories of my life do not fit into a tidy tv series or a convoluted movie plot. In fact, I rarely see evidence of my own historical narrative in mainstream or even sub-stream media. From a social and cultural historical perspective, the w...