Jenny Bloomfield

Most of the people who would read anything I'd write live in the city, or on the fringes of one. I'm speaking to you. Take a walk in the woods. Any expanse where things are allowed to grow as they would will do. The first thing you notice is that your ears are ringing. If you have to hop stumps, it's hard at first, kind of wobbly, then it gets easier. If you are walking with someone, you start out speaking of things from outside, and then you stop speaking. Gradually, colors slip out of their semantic envelopes and start to distinguish themselves. Green becomes a range from black to yellow. Light takes turns in front of and then behind all the surfaces that stop light. Shadows give up the myriad bits held back in shadow. Things as they are reach out to you as you are, as you find yourself. In increments you recognize and make sense of the place. A pattern language, a resonance of sorts, emerges. These patterns tame the border skirmish as you try and determine how much you belong here and how much you are ... not so much trespassing as projecting. The deeper you go, the deeper it gets. 

Where Jenny Bloomfield lives is called Canyon, California, and it is. Canyon is a wooded gully along the upper extension of the San Leandro Creek watershed. It's on the fringes of a city and described as unincorporated, which has a technical meaning but is also a delightful term to cue in just how fringe it is. Good place to have a non-consensual relationship with a tick. This is Jenny Bloomfield's hood and she walks here every day. She's well past getting her sea legs hopping tree stumps. Yet as a cultural being, an artist and one who has a commitment to the lives unfolding in cities and on the fringes of cities, she must still be as tentative as any of us in contemplating her place here, and its place in our hierarchy of needs. To make sense of it, she uses memory, and she uses paint. Almost every day she drives out of the woods and down to a warehouse studio in the different nature of West Oakland to practice painting, which is to say to pull into focus her life, and of late to focus on the Canyon woods. 

It's a risky thing for a contemporary artist to take a stroll in nature and put her or his impressions down afterwards with paint in what amounts to little landscapes, or more accurately, journalistic notations on the landscape. It leaves one open to critiques of nostalgia and cliche. It has after all been done before, and before, and before, for centuries. The only way out of this painter's dilemma is through the paint itself and that's just the route Bloomfield takes. Each motif-each root, limb, branch, frond and rhizome network in this series functions twice, once as an annotated pronouncement of observation and memory, and once as a grammar for the lexicon of painting. The flower is also a trellis. And the tendrils supported on that trellis, scraped, brushed, stippled and smeared as they are in thin washes, are at once paint, and also grown-as­ they-would extensions of the equivalencies in our own system to the systems we traverse in nature. Our life blood. So much depends on this extension of our circulatory system. Bloomfield's Canyon Journal is not just a record of her encounter with an outside world, but a measure of the permeability of the membrane that appears to hold us separate from that world, a gauze through which her paint seeps as a bask in the light, a hover in time, a dissolution of the other, and ultimately a measure of what matters. All this is in the paint, a walk in the woods. 

George Lawson, Emeryville, Ca, July 2018

Twinning

from Jenny Bloomfield, Twinning: Recent Dyptychs catalog

Jenny Bloomfield's bold and intimate paintings have always grown out of a poetic dialogue between her external and internal worlds. Her process is all about the play between her observation and experience of the "outside" (beyond the studio), and the "inside': the interior realm of her process in the studio, which encompasses the making of the painting. This "twinning" approach, the bringing together of two inseparable parts of her practice, is reflected in the title of this exhibition. It is also amplified by Bloomfield's choice of the diptych format, which continues a long tradition of evocative pairings of artworks, ranging from exquisite medieval ivories and Renaissance panels (hinged to relate to each other, formally and symbolically, like the pages of a book) to Cy Twombly's monumental complementary juxtapositions. The diptych is central to some of Bloomfield's formative experiences, from the Wilton Diptych in London's National Gallery, with its panels contrasting the earthly and the heavenly, to Piero della Francesca's diptych double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and his late wife Battista Sforza, with its saturated red singing out against golden yellow and blue, a copy of which hung in Bloomfield's childhood apartment.

The series began just over a year ago, when a friend accidentally broke a small bowl that Bloomfield valued. In gathering the pieces and arranging them to reassemble the bowl, Bloomfield inadvertently took the idea of the bowl fragments with her into the studio. The marks that she made that day took on the life of the arced pieces, and she found that if she extended the lines across the canvas they formed sturdy, satisfying shapes, that jumped back and forth between figure and ground. A new figurative language began to emerge - the bowl was almost left behind - except that it persists in the relationship between the reassuring roundness of its form and what Lao Tze termed its "empty innermost'; which gave it its usefulness. Now the individual fragments begin to break up the empty space of the canvas, introducing gusty movement, which takes its impetus in diptych (From Our Walk), 2016, from an experience of white blossoms blowing across a tarmac road. It is almost as if the pot fragments have taken on a revolutionary life of their own, brimming with light and texture. At the same time, Bloomfield has recreated the impression of a moment, observed and suspended, as powerful and poignant as the falling blossom.

Creating the diptychs within the series was initially intuitive, but soon became an integral part of Bloomfield's process. There is a piecing together of canvases and/or panels, providing a more explicit nod to the intimate relationship between her exterior and interior worlds. These twins are clearly not offspring that were produced in the same moment, nor are they deliberately designed to form conscious parallels with one another. They are more akin to the twins in Greek myth, oddly paired individuals who were conceived when a woman made love to both a mortal and a god on the same day. Or like the god and goddess twins, Apollo and Artemis, identified with the sun and the moon, they convey something about our dualistic nature, and the inter­dependency of light and shadow. Formally, the paired paintings are not necessarily an obvious match. Some are offset against each other, some have an inch divide between them, and yet they make sense together. In this respect, the most interesting parallel is perhaps that of geological twinning, occurring when two separate crystals share some of the same lattice points. The result is an integration, so that the two become a whole, but with a twin boundary separating one from the other.

In diptych (Tin Hat 2), 2016, the two panels are related to each other by shape, form and colour, but they are deliberately differently-sized, which undermines the strict notion of the diptych form. Each panel has a separate life, but each clearly has a bearing on the other. The right hand panel is confident, dynamic, brilliant as a blue sunny day, while the left, smaller, chunky (about an inch thicker than the other), thickly built up, is darker, more complex, more internal, like an x-ray or photographic negative. It is as if the marks in the right hand panel are exuberantly borne on air, while the marks in the left hand panel revolve through darker matter.

For these new works, Bloomfield has returned to her early use of saturated colour, moving away from the characteristic earths and tertiaries of recent years to high-keyed secondaries and primaries. This radiant mood is matched by a more purposeful drawing, with broad arcing marks and looping strokes creating a pictorial and painterly dynamic that is quite her own. Bloomfield is intrigued with the way one painting activates the other. The twinning process gave her the advantage of placing one painting alone and then placing its partner/twin next to it and seeing the moment the relationship was created. This relationship remains with the pairing; it hovers somewhere in the space between the two, existing just beyond the surface of the canvas, and subtly activates the whole. This whole may be perceived in the movement or interlocking of marks, the jump between different colours or tones where the individual panels meet, the dissonant shift between the two, and the accepting or questioning of the decision to place them in this way. Bloomfield compares the effect to the way in which the meaning of a poem is created, and how it resides in the atmosphere generated by the words and the spaces in-between.

Alison Cole, London, May, 2016

Alison Cole is an independent arts critic and consultant based in London. She is former Executive Director of Arts Council England, and a celebrated art historian and author. Her latest book, Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power, was published in February of 2016.

Sewing Shadows

from Jenny Bloomfield, Twinning: Recent Dyptychs catalog

London native and now San Francisco Bay Area-based painter Jenny Bloomfield has described her current practice of pairing up paintings as "twinning;' a term borrowed from the study of crystal formations, and referring to instances wherein structures may grow separately, but in symmetry and with a reflecting plane in common. The shared surface that mitigates the intergrowth of two crystal lattices could stand as a corollary to the conceptual base that underpins the binding together of two otherwise independent images, although in Bloomfield's diptychs, as if in subversion of crystalline mirroring, she will often offset her panels at the joint, or join panels of disparate size and thickness, thus breaking the symmetry. 

In modern usage, diptych has come to mean any two images intended to be viewed together. Originally, it referred specifically to a pair of painted panels connected with a hinge, allowing folding and carrying like a book. The practical point of fastening two pictures together to facilitate portability coincidentally strengthened their narrative, as traveling companions not only joined at the hip, but joined symbiotically as well, by association. The resultant continuity served the story told by the painting; it might pose a saint with a donor or a husband with a wife. Joining two abstract paintings is a greater challenge. At best it heightens the effect of each, and at worst it begs the ques­tion, why? It is just not easy to credibly graft two works that are already complete on their own. A good painting is diminished by close proximity to another; adding an appendage rarely salvages a bad one. Sometimes though, in the most successful of diptychs, Bloomfield's for example, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. 

The modernist impulse to present imagery contiguously is long standing, with the syntax of much of contemporary art built upon juxtaposition of one sort or another. Perhaps the most primary is the conjoining of almost anything with the meta-trope of the art world itself, a form of staging. Common objects tend to engender uncom­mon experiences when isolated within the white cube of the exhibition space. Much of contemporary painting is inherently self-referential and doubling down on this internal reference can introduce some welcome relief. Many painters use multi-panel formats in an effort to extend the formal range of their medium, heighten the physi­cal presence of their work, and even with pure painting, instill a sense of grammar. Bloomfield's motives are no exception but what distinguishes her twins might be the serendipity of their attachment, extending it would seem almost by chance the reach and impact of her gesture. 

Perhaps it is because Bloomfield's individual canvases are so lacking in guile that they play well together, as things left to themselves, just as they are. They have something about them of the perfect fit of found objects, a cowbell paired with a railroad spike or such. Hanging in the gallery, her diptychs seem to reach out and bridge the gap between the artifice of the exhibition space and the husk of the world at large, the real world where pairing happens. The twinned charm and obdurate fact of a painting such as diptych, Tin Hat, 2016, for example, remind me of why Peter Pan had to venture back from Neverland to London to get his shadow sewn back on. In the end Bloomfield has come full circle with the basic function of her diptychs, enhancing if not their portability, then their ability to transport. 

George Lawson, San Francisco, May 2016 

Jenny Bloomfield: the 'Pull' of landscapes

Interview with Kimberly Chun, SFGate, 2013

London-born East Bay artist Jenny Bloomfield is driven to retrace the paths she takes, and the places she's been, in paint. So naturally, the traditions of landscape painting - both English and American - dog her footsteps. Bloomfield's latest works, rendered solely with brushes rather than squeegees, are seemingly awash with light and layered with hues that appear refracted from nature. Although no locations are identifiable, the time she's spent in a rustic Desolation Wilderness cabin owned by her husband's family since the early 1900s has touched the images. "The sense of scale here is just shocking," the artist, 55, says. "Shocking in a really good way - the landscape here has been an incredible influence on me.

Q: What does "Pull" mean to you?

A: Pull suggests an attraction, being drawn to something, like a magnetic pull or a pull like gravity. That's what painting is for me: it's an unavoidable pull. But it also suggests the way the paint is pulled and layered, the way the paint is moved and pulled across canvas."

Q: Is there a story behind a painting like "UpStream"?

A: It does come from the experience of observing a landscape that's pretty harsh - it speaks to the reality of landscape in its rawest sense, and yet there are really intimate places within it. It's sort of like the last painting I did in my "Destination Road" series, in the High Sierra, in the Desolation Wilderness. As I was painting, the marks I was making were drawing me back to this place where I observed waterfalls coming down between rocks. As the painting progressed, I wasn't thinking, I'm going to do a painting of that particular place, but of that experience. Q: That's how it works with each series? A: Yes, usually when you start with an idea, it's not very interesting. Pretty soon, the painting will move on. Ideas are very interesting, but generally, I don't think they last long with a painting. You have to take it out of yourself to where it wants to go away from you, and you pull it back, and it's a continual push-pull, and that's why as long as you paint, it never gets easier. The risk is what it's all about, and you can never get too familiar with paint ... and if you are, you have to push it again.