JENNIFER BAIN
Jennifer Bain is a painter whose work is profoundly influenced by spirituality, nature, and their interplay with contemporary art. Her journey into the concept of art as a spiritual pursuit began at The Rudolph Steiner School in New York City, a renowned institution celebrated for its arts-focused curriculum and mystical philosophies.
Initially, Bain sought a blend of creativity and practicality, earning an A.A. degree in Fashion Design and achieving success in that sector. Nevertheless, her yearning for deeper artistic exploration prompted her to return to academia, culminating in a B.F.A. from The California College of the Arts in 1982, followed by an M.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985.
For a decade, Bain resided in a former paint factory, fostering connections with a vibrant community of artists, musicians, dancers, playwrights, and street performers. This environment encouraged her active participation in numerous group exhibitions in nonprofit spaces.
Since becoming a full-time artist in 1994, Bain has dedicated her practice to creating art in series, delving into diverse painting styles that encompass both abstract and narrative forms. Her artwork has been exhibited in prestigious contemporary galleries across the U.S., Asia, and the Middle East. Her pieces are part of private and corporate collections, as well as being featured in healing environments such as The Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, UCLA, San Francisco General, and Stanford University Hospitals. Additionally, Bain represented the U.S. in the Art in Embassies program in 2005 and 2009.
After thirty-seven years in Oakland, California, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2016 following the death of her husband due to cancer. Now, sharing her life with a native New Mexican, she is flourishing in this new chapter, accompanied by two small dogs and a large cat.
STATEMENT
In my paintings, I create abstract compositional grounds with gestural, chromatically layered surfaces and geometric forms, against which I juxtapose realistic renderings of brightly colored birds. I combine abstraction with bird imagery to symbolically represent ideas such as freedom vs structure, while alluding to concepts like adaptability and transition.
Bird imagery exists geographically and historically as part of many cultures, religions, and traditions. Widely regarded as symbols of freedom due to their ability to soar into the skies, in art birds represent a range of concepts including freedom, nobility, fertility, and bravery. Some cultures consider birds to be messengers of the gods, because they traverse the realms of air, sea and land, flying into the heavens and returning to earth—abilities few other creatures can claim. In many Native American cultures, birds are associated with the creation of the world.
The notion of bird flight signifies breaking free of what binds us to our negative patterns; breaking from these patterns is analogous to soaring the skies. The birds in Bain’s work illustrate the metaphor of striving above our rooted ideas of self, the world, and the “other”, expressing her interest in spirituality and in transcending fixed perceptions of consciousness. The birds themselves sit in still perched postures. Away from flight, they display expressions of thought, gazing at us silently, asking us to interpret.
I’ve reframed birds’ centuries-old associations in abstract compositions to reintroduce these ideas in a contemporary context. In my paintings, birds represent the possibility of elevating consciousness to become free, uniting the concrete world with the world of the spirit.