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Jennifer Balkan
New Paintings
March 6
- 27, 2010
This group of paintings visually describes an emotional journey, a quest for balance and harmony in the face of disruption.
Fortune cookie fortunes are typically positive. They are often encouraging and quirky. Like having your fortune read to you, your horoscope or your astrological chart, it seems to be fundamentally human to want to be curious about what one’s future holds and furthermore to want or need to identify with some ascribed label or fortune. If you choose to believe your fortune, you choose to be hopeful.
Each painting depicts a raw emotional state and narrative. The map fragments compose a compositional design that illustrates an order, a chaos, an unraveling, a sense of belonging, and a sense of displacement. I have associated a fortune, which is based on the particular emotional narrative, with each piece.
The subjects are composites of shapes and pieces and elements that break apart into little pieces or strokes of paint when seen up close. Their backgrounds are also composites of pieces cut and sewn together to create an abstraction out of an arbitrary set of political boundaries. I find that the lines of built and natural infrastructure depicted in the maps make a rich context for the subject.
Although Jennifer had drawn all her life, she didn't embrace her passion to paint until 2001. She studied behavioral neuroscience at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, then worked serving the mentally ill and developmentally disabled population in Seattle. She was pulled to Austin to study Latin American sociology at the University of Texas, and attained her Ph.D. in 2001 after conducting anthropological fieldwork on human migration in Chiapas, Mexico in 1999. Although Jennifer's experience in Mexico was rich, she longed for artistic creativity. In 2002, she quit her full-time job doing social scientific research and threw herself into oil painting and now paints fervently. She also teaches painting and drawing to adults and teens.
She writes "I now realize that my time studying the human psyche both psychologically and sociologically must have left its imprint on my brain permanently...because I cannot seem to stray too far from it in my painting."
Jennifer is in New American Paintings, vol. 72, available in bookstores around the country.
www.newamericanpaintings.com
web site: www.jenniferbalkan.net
Click images to enlarge