Lately, most of
my studio visits are being made in preparation for upcoming group
exhibitions, and there are few exceptions. Yet one recent visit was done
out of the blue, and it proved quite a surprise. The artist is Jenny Carpenter,
originally from Omaha, Nebraska, but who has traveled and lived in
various locations around the U.S., and also Australia, Southeast Asia,
Europe, and South Africa. These trips are made possible by her work as a
freelance art director at various advertising agencies in cities where
she has lived. As a New Yorker myself, and thoroughly ensconced in the
New York art world, I was very surprised to hear how much the artist
traveled. She was able to also take long periods of seclusion in her
painting between bouts of travel and work, and New York remained for her
a place to dream, not merely one to struggle.
I walked up the
six flights of steps in a typical West Village red brick apartment
building to be met by her at the threshold of her front door, a charming
and somewhat stoical young woman, nervous since, as she said, there had
not been many studio visits for her yet. Her small but well appointed
home was preceded by a long narrow hallway, and one entered both the
living room and the light of day. A wide green couch faced the windows,
with a mostly northern exposure, though we know that nothing in the West
Village faces exactly in one direction. The work was arranged all on
one wall to my left, the artist sitting at my right ahead of me, just
under those great village views.
In her emailed
statement, she said that she painted oil on stained wood to allow the
grain to influence the lines of a woman's face, with the scale of each
image being a 1 to 1 ration on 12” x 12” birch board. I looked at these
images and began to talk with her, and had a positive feeling. Here was
some good work. A nice tight idea, a concept in the making garnered from
her influences in the working world and how they merged with a
particular notion of beauty, as well as all of the visual conceits that
enter into the moment of aesthetic fascination when a beautiful woman
appears on the printed page--a simulacra made palpable and commercial at
the same time. Carpenter focuses mainly upon close-ups, and the images
among these that I preferred were limited to a frame of the eyes, mouth,
and cheekbones, with the eyes gazing deeply back at the spectator.
My main concern
in learning to appreciate Carpenter’s work was my opinion on her
sources. Since she does work in advertising, it is both natural and
somewhat presumptuous that she would choose a type of imagery culled
from the pages of fashion magazines. Yet the need to portray women’s
faces--and she paints only women--has found perfect repository in the
commercially viable and yet ultimately short lived use of such
magazines. Here is where women are most notably typified, and if one
wants a pictorial jumping-off point, there is no context more widespread
than this, whether the point is to offer an alternative pictorial
treatment or to freely sample the traditional modes of emotional
expression which fashion models are forced to espouse. The specifically
successful aspect of her portraits is that they portray all women in
depicting the nameless ciphers used to exemplify the sort of passion
that sells couture. Carpenter’s paintings zoom past the trappings of the
industry and reveal the fuel that runs it: emotional intimacy. She
qualifies the essential humanness which makes models more than visceral
clotheshorses.
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