Published in Art Guide Magazine, Artist Directory volume 3
Interview with Jennifer Bain

What is your journey in art.

I was born in New York City to parents who were both artists. My mother and father emigrated from Canada after World War 2 to pursue their respective art careers. The booming excitement of post war American Art was embedded in my childhood. The world was a place of great optimism, new ideas, and a break from the past. Those were the retorts or lessons I learned at home, mostly by example. I saw Andy War-hol’s Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup can works when I was quite young. The later gave me nightmares for years!

At some point I realized my parents might be what people called “beatniks” and that we lived in a world very different from the families I saw on T.V. Never having a birthday party was explained to me by my mother as “ we don’t that kind of thing – we are artist”. She was trying to save my feelings from getting hurt, as a majority of my classmates would not have attended a party in my neighborhood. I took it in stride because I drew, painting and created things everyday myself, as did both my brothers. We were allowed to draw on our bedroom walls, and create anything we wanted in our rooms. There was one long hallway wall in our apartment we all shared that was a canvas in motion. We would “outdraw” each other, alter images, paste over things, and redo or re draw what was there at any time. It taught us to share, be respectful or each other and be open minded visually.

I attended The Rudolph Steiner School (Scholarship), which allowed me a huge va-riety of expression, and ways to learn. The school was based on education through art, and I was a perfect fit. This is where I ab-sorbed the world of ideas and philosophies.

But the caveat of such a rich cultural life had the downside of monetary instability, and my brothers and I felt the pinch of this uncertainty. Because of this I had no desire to follow in my parents footsteps after high school. A life of insecurity was out, and so I decided to get a degree in a practical art – fashion! I felt being a fashion designer would be creatively satisfying and earn me a steady paycheck, and so I got an A.A. degree and plunged into that field. It was a natural transition as I had been making cloths for all my friends and myself since junior high school. I got good jobs right out of design school, and worked my way up to assistant designer in junior sportswear, and I did make a good salary. I was living independently in Los Angels, had a decent apartment in West Hollywood, good friends and lots of museums around me, but I was desperate for time to paint. I took this des-peration right onto my apartment walls and painted murals on them.

Then suddenly I was struck down with le-gionnaires disease when I was 24. I was gravely ill and spent twenty-one days in the ICU unit at Cedars – Sinai Hospital, Los An-geles. I survived, but I was changed. Some-where far away in the middle of this experi-ence, or as a result of it, I realized I was not living the right life. It took several months to get my strength back but I knew I had to pursue art and leave my comfortable life behind. I paired down my belongings, broke my wedding engagement, and drove up to Northern California to attend The California School of the Arts. I then continued on to get a Masters degree in painting from The San Francisco Art Institute.

I lived the ideal difficult life of a student, and later an artist, living happily below the margins and honing my craft. I was able to fall back periodically on my training in fash-ion and worked part time as an assistant in the men’s shirt division at Levi Straus & Company. I also taught dance exercise and aerobics to support myself. My life was also enhanced greatly by my marriage to a fel-low artist. We supported and encouraged each other, and both found our own suc-cess in our practices. I lost him to cancer in 2016. He was a young 66.

I experienced commercial success for many decades, working with many galleries, and art consultants. I erased my childhood fears of instability with my success and long run practice. I am now exploring my work with a different focus, and that is the idea of ex-ploration itself.

What/Who do you consider to be your greatest influence and why?

Apart from the discovery that happens in the art practice itself, I have been influ-enced by ideas, concepts, and philosophies that have a link to what I am exploring in the studio. One example: for about a decade my work focused on abstractions relating to Daoism’s Dao de Jing. The idea of wa-ter being an entity that is shapeless, flow-ing, and takes the path of least resistance. These were characteristics I was applying to my yoga practice. In practical ways for translation of this I hiked many streams and waterways and used careful observation to bring back to the studio to translate by ac-tion. I did not do any drawings ion the field, but instead would observe and sometimes meditate at the sites to absorb the essence of what I perceived. The work that was created from this process was not a literal depiction, but rather a synthesis of obser-vation and experience. Both the idea and the result exist in the ephemeral.

My work that followed was influenced by the idea of the then new current culture of the Internet. In this work I explored how to appropriate disparate images and make them coexist in a convincing way. I would say the catalyst for this work was the bar-rage of images and speed at which visuals are forced on us through the Internet. The paintings read like filmstrips or scrolled web pages.

But conclusively, my biggest influence is really the idea of the spiritual in art. This was introduced to me through The Rudolph Steiner School teachings based in Anthro-posophy.It’s not the teachings themselves that had a big impact. It’s the notion that there is a larger connection to the here and now, this has propelled my life’s work.

What is your goal as an artist?

To continue to explore and do the best job I can with my work. I have painted many decades, and have been rewarded by free-dom from doubt. I think all creative work is a desire to communicate and connect to others and the world at large. My hope is to stay in that flow, and continue to explore.

www.jenniferbain.com

Published in Artist Directory, Volume 3, 2020
Abstract Lines; Interview with Jennifer Bain