I first chose to paint because the marks could be seen as a direct expression of an emotion: line, colour and movement, there to be read like a large book open on the wall. It was satisfying to arrange the emotions and create an order and balance. This was a long time ago, but it was the beginning of my need to contemplate my responses to life. Painting is rich in the qualities that reflect these needs. It is direct and responsive, private and flexible. It proposes solutions and then raises new questions that are better than those with which one started.
Suddenly Blue
The News that Nature Breaks
My paintings have always grown out of a poetic dialogue between my external and internal worlds. The process is a play between observations and experiences beyond the studio and the interior realm, which encompasses the making of the painting. The materials provide a metaphorical way to address the complexities of these external influences.
Mostly I’m not working directly from nature; I’m relying on memory and paint and I’m interested to discover what matters by what appears on the canvas.
Making broad abstract marks initially, the painting moves slowly, finding it’s own rhythm and composition. This layering allows the painting to find a new way of saying something embedded in the process and whose meaning exists on it’s own terms.
In 2020 I started painting flowers and plants through the lens of our experience of that fire season. The series was born out of observing the flowers, trees and bushes turn into ghosts of themselves as the light all but disappeared into brown as the smoke from the Willits fire descended. Standing in the garden – feeling like life was slipping away was profoundly disturbing, and at the same time eerily beautiful. It felt like a melting together of two worlds. Returning to the studio the Suddenly Blue series began.
There is no doubt the issues of climate change run deep through this series, but painting responds to it’s own making. It listens and reflects the news back as it sees fit. It is news restored to an essential rhythm and tied to the mysterious aspect of the times.
Jenny Bloomfield, December 2021
NumiNosity
I first came across the word numinous in the forward to the book “Voices At The Worlds Edge,” which is a collection of poems by a number of Irish poets invited to spend some time on two islands that rise out of the Atlantic off of the west coast of Ireland- Skellig Michael and Little Skellig. These islands had been inhabited for 600 years by hermits, anchorites and holy men who wanted a place that would bring them closer to their God.
In her forward Marie Heaney writes, “I will never forget my own visit there…I had a sense of the numinous---as if I had landed on Prospero’s island.” There was something about her phrase “I will never forget” and the word “numinous” that caught my attention, and though I didn’t know what numinous meant, I got the feeling it referred to something almost indescribable. So I looked it up.
Numinous; from the Latin word nuere meaning to nod, or a nod. This is no simple nod, but a nod from the Gods. A sign that will lead you, confirm your belief and encourage your faith. It reminds me of making paintings, the moment one hopes for. It also reminds me of moments in my life that remain relevant even after years have gone by. They connect time to eternity: time experienced as emotion, meaning, and relevance, where linear time ceases to exist. These moments feel like inspired thought frozen in space, connected to each other by an invisible thread.
Intuition, premonition, coincidence, déjà vu, consciousness, contemplation and dreams. These words spring to mind when I think about numinous, and many of these words are relevant to me in my painting, and then painting has it
’s own ideas as well. Working with the subtleties of color, tone and composition is mostly humbling. The physical properties of the paint tease your ideas that get buried for the most part, reminding you that you are better off not fully in control. When a painting actually works it feels like a nod from the Gods who respect the unexpected. When I proposed the title Numinosity for our show at Liberty Arts to Tor he said “Numinosity it is! It is what has tied our work together from the start”.
Jenny Bloomfield, March 2014
Destination Road Series
This work became homage to the landscape and a reflection on pilgrimage. California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. I end up loving the names of the states and the landscape that defines the names so distinctly. I am open as this road, floating at an easy 60 mph. The truck like a silver insect humming its way across the Southwest. Vast and empty, nearing our destination, the West Texas landscape becomes the Texas character for me. I fall for it, taking in details and suspending criticism. Nature becomes reality. The awesome beauty of the landscape couples with a singular harshness. It stuns you into submission. We stop, step out to take a break, and a large black tarantula ambles over the stubbly dry ground. About 60 miles out of Marfa, 11 miles down a dirt road, is one of Donald Judd’s ranches. As we bounce over the dry earth we are no longer observing the horizon at a distance, we are there and in we go, right into the heart of the landscape. A while later, marked by an orange flag (easy to miss) is our left turn into the ranch. The tiny house demands my full attention. It is perfect, seemingly unchanged, just the barest of essentials. Preconceptions fall away fast. The Ranch’s manifest simplicity proposes a challenge to the very nature of the way I paint.
When I get home, back into the studio, I realize each state we crossed has a clear character in my memory. Recalled like a face with timeworn experience. I start to paint these landscapes working fast, trying to retrace each step. They have triggered a nerve, jump-started an awareness of time, space and something else; something to be worked out in the process of painting. I am looking for a quality that describes a sense of place present and past at the same time, and I am drawn to the colors of old photographs. Something about the photographic quality speaks to a documented time and moment, and sets up a tension between the real and the imagined, memory and paint.
Jenny Bloomfield, May 2009
Pull
“Pull” suggests attraction, being drawn to something. A magnetic pull, or the unavoidable pull of gravity. It is how I feel about painting.
Some of these paintings are inspired by an experience, a time or a place. The Tehachapi paintings are a response to seeing the wild flowers blooming on the mountains on a journey back from LA. Turning a curve in the road suddenly the world was transformed by shimmering iridescent color that seemed to float just above the surface of the hillside. The paintings did start out very colorful, then transformed into what they are now. They remind me of the experience, but also remind me of how paint transforms experience.
UpStream was inspired by the experience of watching the waterfalls from the melting snow up in Desolation Wilderness. Gravity, granite and water shifted my limited sense of time to geologic time. Nothing had looked so 'real' to me before, except perhaps Oakland, driving home from the hospital with my newborn. It is interesting to me that the painting resolved itself at a quieter place down stream from the falls. I called it UpStream because it is up stream from the cabin where I thought about it all.
GreenUntitled is slightly different, the vertical and horizontal brush marks weave a painting that pushes more towards abstraction. It is more about light and paint, than an experience. As I painted it I felt its subject was color, balance and paint. As I look at it now I am also pulled towards landscape and sky. The emotion of the search makes it's way through to the surface from the layers underneath.”
Jenny Bloomfield, 2013