Fine Art Market Guide from
American Artists & Painters to Watch
Brent Jensen, Rockport, oil, 18 x 24.
Beauty and the Blight The streets of Los Angeles provide constant inspiration for William Wray’s urban landscapes
william wray
Lincoln Heights Night, oil, 16 x 12.
B y B o n n i e G a n g e l h o ff
Doughnut shops and convenience stores. Shabby hotels and old drive-ins. California painter William Wray relishes painting places like these along the back streets of metropolitan Los Angeles. Wray proudly declares he is a painter of blight—a chronicler of the fading urban remains of a bygone era. He wants to capture these scenes on canvas before developers replace them all with strip malls. Although he has been accused of having a depraved sense of humor, Wray is not joking about his artistic commitment to finding beauty in the blight. Indeed, his mission is to consider places most people don’t think are worth remembering and turn them into works of art. “Anyone can paint the Empire State Building,” he says. “I pick less dramatic subjects. And when I can get a good painting from the banal, I know I have succeeded.” Wray describes himself as a founding member of the L.A. River School of Urban Impressionism. But he confesses that the “school” refers merely to a looseknit group of artists who paint the area around the Los Angeles River and eschew traditional picture-postcard landscapes. You are unlikely to see Wray set up his easel along the Pacific Coast Highway to paint seascapes of waves crashing against craggy rocks—he leaves that to other artists. The painting he entered in the recent California Art Club Gold Medal Show says something about his vision: AT THE BEACH features a coastal scene, all right, but it spotlights a corpulent woman seated in a plastic beach chair at the edge of the ocean.
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Southern Connector, oil, 18 x 26.
Wray’s painting stood out in a room full of elegant figurative works and traditional landscapes. But then again, he himself stands out to onlookers when, wearing a bandana on his head and a tank top that reveals bulging biceps, he hops on his bicycle to go in search of new painting locations. Dressed this way, the former body builder looks like one of the superheroes from his other line of artistic work. Film animation and comic book illustration fill Wray’s hours when he’s not painting. In fact, it was only in 2004 that he began to devote himself seriously to fine art. But with a successful illustration career that includes animation work for the Ren and Stimpy Show and collaborating on the comic book Hellboy Junior, Wray is hardly a stranger to the art business. In 2006, just two years after coming onto the art scene, Wray won the Artists’ Choice Award at the San Luis Obispo Plein Air Painting Festival, and last year he won a top honor at a Laguna Plein Air
Painters Association show. With his history in the film industry, it’s easy to associate him with the California Scene Painters, many of whom worked as background artists for Disney Studios in the 1930s and were also fineart painters who depicted Southern California’s urban and rural scenes. But they were watercolor artists, Wray points out. He more closely identifies with the early California Impressionists, with their emphasis on light and drawing. However, he notes, there is one difference. “I don’t want to be a timeless, classic artist,” Wray says. “I want to comment on my time—even if some of the buildings I depict are pretty old.” His brushwork and style have evolved over the past few years, he says. In the beginning, he didn’t want a single brush stroke to show. But after reviewing works by artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Payne, he began educating himself about how to paint with more bravado. “I like that crazy, crawly brushwork on
everything. And I wondered how to do that.” Classes and workshops with painters Carolyn Anderson, Jove Wang, and Ray Roberts helped show the way. These days, a camera is Wray’s constant companion, supplying the source material for his paintings. His photo forays around L.A. may be planned “expeditions,” as he calls them, or spontaneous “adventures,” as was the discovery of an obscure alley he eyed one day on his way to a Pasadena restaurant. The light hit a white-washed building in an intriguing way, and he liked the feeling of the scene. Wray clicked the camera button and the image eventually turned into the afternoon streetscape PASADENA ALLEY [see page 5]. Wray’s home and studio are located in Sierra Madre, about half an hour from downtown Los Angeles. A town of about 10,000 people, Sierra Madre is nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Wray boasts that it has no stop lights and only one chain restaurant. And
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that’s the kind of place he likes to call home. His 600-square-foot studio sports vaulted ceilings, making it seem larger than the numbers reveal. It’s no surprise that the space is packed with art books, old toys, and an array of characters from Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Amid this creative nest, he also keeps the photographs he sorts through looking for beauty amid the banal. But he doesn’t adhere strictly to the photographic images when creating a painting; sometimes he adds a touch of his own, as in SOUTHERN CONNECTOR [see page 3]. His photo of the San Gabriel River Freeway didn’t have a blimp in it, but he decided to add one. “I felt like it needed a surreal element,” Wray says. “Blimps have
a magical feel. They are majestic and yet there is something comical about them. They also have a nice, simple shape. And they are a window to the past.”
The source material for
BOY was actually a photograph he bought on eBay. The photo reminded him of himself at that age. The youngster portrayed in the painting appears isolated and a little lost. But perhaps that is reading into the image after learning more about Wray’s background and that fact he was an Army brat who moved constantly. His father, a lieutenant colonel in Army intelligence, uprooted the family many times, moving to places like Germany, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. Early on, art
became a comfortable refuge for Wray. He often drew scenes that reflected the World War II era he was growing up in. “There were lots of bombs and blowing things up,” he recalls. “I was always drawing because I was lonely.” He was 10, Wray says, when his family moved to Costa Mesa, CA, and he finally began to feel rooted somewhere. By the time he was in his teens, he was already working in the animation business and drawing comic strips. After high school, Wray attended a community college for a while, but his art teachers hated academic, representational art. “They mocked me for wanting to draw and paint traditionally. Putting TVs in sandboxes was their taste,” Wray says.
Convair 990, oil, 12 x 16.
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Pasadena Alley, oil, 16 x 20 Boy, oil, 10 x 9..
In 1983, on the advice of a drawing teacher he respected, he applied for and received a scholarship to the renowned Art Students League of New York and headed east. Wray found a cheap apartment and supported himself with comic book and illustration work. In the early ’90s, L.A. call him back with an offer he couldn’t refuse—animation work on the Ren and Stimpy Show, a cartoon that featured a hyper Chihuahua and a clueless cat. Wray is currently working on Mighty B, a children’s cartoon that features Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler as the star voice over—another offer he couldn’t refuse. But he also continues to scour the rough edges of L.A. by bike, foot, and car. The obvious question is: Why would a successful animator and illustrator want a second career in fine art? “I like comics, animation, and painting equally,” Wray says. “But I wanted one field where I have the personal freedom to paint what I want. Fine art is that.” These days his fine art is taking a new direction as he incorporates more fig-
This content has been abridged from an original article written by Bonnie Gangelhoff. © F+W Media, Inc. All rights reserved. F+W Media grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.
ures into his urbanscapes. He keeps noticing people that intrigue him, that he wants to put in a painting. But first, he says, he has to overcome his fear of violating people’s personal space with his camera. He wants to feel more comfortable taking candid pictures of complete strangers. Recently he looked out the window and saw a beehive of little girls playing a game they call Runaway Baby. They snuggled a doll in a carriage and then gave the buggy a big push. The carriage veered madly until it crashed and the baby fell out. The game intrigued him, and he wished he had snapped a photo for a future painting. As this story went to press, he was waiting for the neighborhood girls to gather and play the game again. Perhaps viewers at next year’s Gold Medal Show will see a painting by William Wray titled RUNAWAY BABY. Stay tuned. F Bonnie Gangelhoff is the senior editor at Southwest Art.
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Four in a Row, oil, 22 x 30.
Colorado artist Nathan Solano finds inspiration in all things western By M ar k Mussar i
Nathan solano
Way Out West
Nathan Solano doesn’t really like to talk about his artwork. But that’s alright—his canvases speak volumes. With their elegant chromaticism and captivating figures, his paintings reveal a keen eye for both natural lighting and figurative gesture. Although Solano falls under the aegis of a western painter, his narratives are more pictorial than historical. The light in a distant window, a horse’s tail
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catching the sun, a face slightly turned— these subtle elements convey the story in Solano’s paintings. “My own story is not typical of most painters,” admits Solano, who lives and works in Pueblo, CO. His father was a coal miner in Dragerton, UT, where the younger Solano was born and raised. “I drew a lot as a child,” he recalls, “but my parents didn’t think you could make a living doing art.” Still, they were readers and imparted this interest in their son: “They made me read 24 books every summer.” As a child, Solano won a “Draw Me” contest, and while in high school he took an art class on a partial art scholarship. “But I never envisioned making a living at it,” he observes. Solano attended Colorado State University and then the University of Colorado, but he could not stay focused on his studies. “Before long I was drafted into the army and spent a year in Vietnam,” he says. When he returned from his stint as an infantry sergeant, Solano began to take ceramic and photography classes. “I The Make Up of a Cowgirl, oil, 22 x 28.
Paired Up, oil, 18 x 30.
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took classes that interested me,” he explains. This training led to a job as a photographer on a local newspaper. Today, he traces his strong compositional sense to that experience. “But the learning curve really steepened when I became an illustrator at an ad agency,” he comments. To make a living, Solano juggled jobs in advertising, illustration, and bartending. Solano started to paint after moving to Florida in 1982. “I was doing a lot of work for a real estate company,” he says. “Every week they wanted a new painting showing a scene from their development.” Commissions soon came in from restaurants, too. “I received a commission for 15 paintings from a sports bar,” he remembers. In 1987, he returned to Colorado and took a job with Hewlett-Packard in Colorado Springs, but was laid off shortly thereafter. “I began doing freelance paintings for restaurants in Colorado Springs and Pueblo,” he says. Solano may not have
realized it at the time, but he was slowly becoming a full-time painter. His painterly eye soon turned toward western landscape and narrative. “I’ve always had an affinity for riding horses,” says the artist. At one point he met a rancher and began to herd and brand for him. These experiences fed into his paintings. “I’m not a cowboy, but once you do it, you know what it’s supposed to look like,” he notes. Though often reticent about discussing his artistic inspiration, Solano does point out that “you can’t wait for inspiration to strike. You have to work through it. If you have to be inspired to paint, you’re in the wrong business.” Solano’s background in photography also informs his canvases. “Photography jump-starts me. I have thousands of photographs that I use for ideas,” he says, readily acknowledging the advantages of working from photographs, particularly when capturing gestures that define
and add character to his figures. “When trying to do figures on horseback—or a crowd scene or a portrait—a photograph will pick up the details,” he observes. Painting from photos can pose challenges, though, especially when painting livestock. “The camera often captures animals at odd moments. If I painted directly from a photograph, it wouldn’t look right,” he explains. “That’s one of the limitations of photography.” Many of Solano’s paintings reveal the interplay that occurs between original photographic image and artistic interpretation. He admits that he is more concerned with evoking a feeling than historical fact. “Still,” he says, “I wouldn’t put a Hopi blanket on a southern Cheyenne [Indian].” For reference purposes, he maintains files of historical photographs, especially of Native American tribes. Though Solano is best known for his western works, his scope is actually
Out Standing in Their Field, oil, 30 x 46.
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Full Moon Warrior, oil, 12 x 9.
much broader: He has received commissions to paint several National Football League players and has also done work for the Air Force Academy’s football program. Yet for someone who readily admits he’s not a cowboy, he is clearly attuned to the cowboy way of life and the history of the West.
Solano paints every day of the week, including weekends. “I’m driven to do so,” he says. “It’s also a necessity because I do 10 to 12 shows a year.” He is especially fond of the annual Art for the Sangres show, held in Westcliffe, CO, with proceeds going to local land
preservation. Solano’s work has also appeared in the respected annual American Miniatures show at Settlers West Galleries in Tucson, AZ. For years, he held a private one-man show at Christmastime in his Pueblo studio, which is located in a 100-year-old former post office building that he shares with four to five other artists. “It has 14-foot ceilings—I love it,” he says. His painting OUT STANDING IN THEIR FIELD [see page 8] exhibits an impressionist sensibility toward lighting and color. It depicts a field of grass near the Arkansas River, with grass encompassing a good two-thirds of the canvas. “It was
This content has been abridged from an original article written by Mark Mussari, Ph.D. © F+W Media, Inc. All rights reserved. F+W Media grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.
summer, about 6:30 in the evening,” Solano recalls. “I laid out the colors first—lots of purples, greens, oranges, and reds.” The soft symphony of tones loosely defining the field balances the more defined trees in the top third of the canvas. A thin stripe of yellow light defines the horizon beyond the trees. “This one came out the way I saw it in my head,” adds the artist. In FOUR IN A ROW [see page 6], he moves the eye to ground level to show a cowboy on horseback about to lasso some calves. “They were branding about 600 head that day,” remembers Solano, who has wrestled and branded a few cattle in his day. The mass of running cattle gives the canvas a voluminous quality, with the artist using a loose, almost abstract brush stroke to convey the animals in the background. Solano admits that two of the four calves in the foreground were originally white. “I changed them to black for contrast,” he explains. The cowboy serves as the painting’s focal point. Encircled by running cattle, the cowhand lifts his lasso in the moment just before capture. A flash of light glints on his hands and hat. “I like backlight,” notes the painter. For FULL MOON WARRIOR, Solano posed a model from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The figure, sitting on a grazing horse, depicts a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe as he stops in a field on a moonlit night. White paint on the warrior’s face repeats in the horse’s mane, face, and pasterns, echoing the solid white disc of the moon. In rendering the background, Solano seems to paint solid atmosphere in the shimmering blue ambiance. “I don’t start with a concrete idea,” explains Solano, who claims that his greatest challenge in painting is “making it look right.” Describing his approach as “an editing process,” he says he often wishes he had more time with each canvas. “I can work on a painting forever,” he admits, “but there comes a point when you have to stop.” There is something undeniably ironic about Solano’s reluctance to talk about his paintings, because they have so much to say. But maybe he knows that. “I just paint what I see,” he insists. Fortunately for the rest of us, we get to see it, too. F Mark Mussari, Ph.D., writes frequently about art and design for a number of publications.
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21 Under 31
Dementia, oil, 38 x 48.
Candice Bohannon California
ART EDUCATION: Bachelor of fine arts from
BEST ADVICE RECEIVED: You can’t succeed on
Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach, CA.
talent alone. Hard work and diligence will lead you to great achievements.
STYLE: Contemporary realism. MOST INTERESTING THING ABOUT THE WAY YOU WORK: I don’t draw anything out on canvas before
CREATIVE SPARK: The emotional quality found in a person, place, or thing. I started painting DEMENTIA after I was hired to give art lessons to a woman to help slow the deterioration of her mind.
I begin. I just start with fresh wet paint and have my reference there in front of me.
PRICE RANGE: $200 to $10,000.
SECOND-CHOICE CAREER: Writer.
GALLERIES: www.candicebohannon.com.
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Everyday Poetry Landscape artist Joseph Paquet seeks to transcend mere description
Studio Self Portrait (detail), oil, 20 x 16.
You might say landscape art-
Factory Shadow, oil, 40 x 30.
B y R o s e ma r y C a r s t e n s
ist Joe Paquet is thirsty. He eagerly drinks in life and savors it, greeting the world with both arms open wide. Yet there is nothing naive or sentimental in Paquet’s paintings. His work extends beyond romantic notions of man and landscape and digs deep to evoke the more lasting, genuine beauty to be found in endurance and grit. In his words, “the majority of my subjects originate from the Midwestern factories and neighborhoods surrounding my home, where I find earnest harmony in the unrehearsed reality of the working class.” Paquet, who is based in St. Paul, MN, is often inspired by scenes of industrial decay set against an urban skyline or a middle-class neighborhood on a gray winter’s day. He is the working man’s artist, and his paintings speak of the honesty and utility of ordinary things, the glory of nature as it is, not as we might want it to be. “I believe the depths of nature can only be plumbed through humility. The moment the ego overrides that, the door to true understanding shuts,” says Paquet. Calling himself a “contemporary American scene painter,” the artist always works from life, generally creating oil sketches and field studies on location that he later translates to large canvases. At times, he even works quite large right on location. “He’s one of the few painters who does this,” says arts writer and curator Susan Hallsten McGarry. “Paquet has a great ability to imply detail with an economy of strokes and colors. Part of
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what is so special about his work is that he really wants to paint something that has meaning to him.” Years ago, Paquet visited an exhibition of Russian painting and iconography and saw Isaak Levitan’s EVENING ON THE VOLGA. Paquet was mesmerized by its subtle power and how it claimed attention “with a whisper” through its exqui-
site tonality. He found Levitan’s work “almost painfully poetic” and was struck by the artist’s ability to represent nature’s magnificence without romanticizing it and to present “the universal in the particular.” In his own work, Paquet strives to create this quality of genuineness in things that might be outwardly unremarkable and unpretentious but, upon
closer viewing, retain a unique beauty of their own. “I am painting my world as it is today,” he says, “portraying the utilitarian nature of things that have ‘had a life’ and reveal a subtle character all their own.” As a plein-air painter, Paquet vigorously fights to freeze time, to work fast enough to “capture shadows, the character of
Morning Light, Crystal Cove, oil, 20 x 24.
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edge and shape, and prismatic light and color as value”—all of a single moment. This often means being outdoors in extreme weather, battling cold and heat, rain, snow, or wind. It can be physically demanding but also exhilarating. It engages all of the senses and informs the work. Paquet tells of being on a painting trip in Italy with days of driving rain. He spent a miserable day searching for a sheltered place to set up his easel and paint. He slipped on a rock, slid down a muddy hill on his backside, landed with his feet in the freezing river, and cracked his easel box. He was completely frustrated yet determined to paint. As night began to fall, he bundled up against the cold, grabbed a large canvas, and climbed up to the Piazzale di Michelangelo, which overlooks the Arno as it flows through Florence. The weather was heavy and intense, the dampness eating through his clothing, but he painted for five hours, finally returning to his hotel, victorious and happy. Paquet feels there is no substitute for being “in front of nature,” quickly and passionately stroking paint, making rapid-fire decisions about hue and value, and fighting against time to fully capture what he sees and feels. “These days,” the artist says, “what I really try to do is see more deeply—and see color more honestly.”
Born and raised in New Jersey, Paquet grew up in a busy, creative household with two brothers and two sisters. He says he loved to draw “as far back as I can remember” and feels fortunate that his parents let him follow his dreams. His father worked for the railroad, but at heart he was an artist, painting and sculpting when he could manage the time. Both his parents encouraged him in his painting and drawing. Though he loved sports and was a jock in high school, Paquet knew he wasn’t destined to play pro ball. Both his coach and his art teacher recognized his artistic talent and pushed him to go to art school. He went on to earn a bachelor’s of fine arts at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Paquet mentions several artists who have influenced his work: American impressionist Willard Metcalf, French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and American realist Edward
Sea Salt and Eucalyptus, oil, 22 x 28.
Hopper. “Hopper had a gift for distilling to an essence, a very personal roux,” notes Paquet. He also mentions two mentors who have been key to his artistic growth and development. While at the School for Visual Arts, Paquet studied with John Foote, who, he says, “opened my eyes to the exquisiteness and joy of drawing the human figure.” After graduating, Paquet wanted to continue his study of figurative drawing. One day he saw a small sign in a window: “Sketch classes on Wednesday nights.” There he met painter John Osborne, who worked in an old train station that served as his classroom and studio. Paquet was stunned by the large, powerful landscapes Osborne produced from memory. “Osborne gave me the keys to outdoor painting. He was humble, deliberate, and sincere. He knew more about light and color than all the teachers I had had before,” says Paquet, who apprenticed with the painter for four years. Following his apprenticeship, Paquet did nothing but paint for an entire year—
one of his most productive periods. He soon married and became a father and embarked on a career as an illustrator, graphic designer, and art director to pay the bills. Still, painting was his passion, and he followed that muse wherever and whenever he could. In 1997 he took a teaching position at the Minnesota River School of Fine Arts in Burnsville. He enjoyed teaching, but it was an emotionally difficult period for him because he was going through a divorce. In time, he met his present wife, Natalie, and opened a studio in downtown St. Paul, where he began his own painting workshops. “I love teaching as much as painting,” he says, noting that he strives to develop each student’s skill set “so that he or she can speak more eloquently.” Paquet has grown to treasure living in Minnesota, which he describes as a “visually quiet place.” He often travels to both the East and West Coasts to paint, but Minnesota helps keep him centered. In California, the brilliant colors and contrasts continually stimulate him, calling
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God and the Railroad, oil, 24 x 30.
for a different palette. In his home state of New Jersey, slight differences in color values become critical. This intrigues him, as beauty is found in those subtle differences. The austerity of the weather provides balance and frames the excitement of new experiences elsewhere. Paquet’s time spent tramping through and driving along the streets of St. Paul, walking coastal beaches, or exploring new regions abroad is in sharp contrast to his quieter hours, yet one nourishes the other. He is an avid reader—especially of poetry, art history, and books about artists and their work. He quotes poet Rainer Maria Rilke about the importance of authenticity: “…try to say what you see and feel and love. . . . what your everyday life offers you . . . go into yourself and see
how deep the place is from which your life flows: at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create.” Paquet has received both the Artists’ Choice and Collectors’ Choice awards at the annual Laguna Beach Plein Air Painting Invitational, as well as the 2008 Alden Bryan Memorial Prize from New York’s Salmagundi Club. His reputation is notable among fellow landscape painters, gallery owners, collectors, and students. Fifteen years ago, well-known collector Roy Rose was struck by the high caliber of Paquet’s work when he discovered him painting on the streets of Avalon, a small village on Catalina Island in California. He continues to be amazed by the artist’s passion for his craft and his
This content has been abridged from an original article written by Rosemary Carstens. © F+W Media, Inc. All rights reserved. F+W Media grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.
knowledge of art history. Says Rose, “Everything around Paquet interests him. He sees painting subjects everywhere. Traditional landscapes, unique architecture, industrial scenes, or old neighborhoods with all their defects and signs of life strewn about. You can’t help looking at the places in his paintings and have a sense of the people who inhabit them.” Paquet is a storyteller and poet, crafting his tales of life and landscape with his brush, revealing to all the subtle, nuanced beauty of the ordinary scenes around us. For Paquet, there is “such great beauty in things being simply what they are.” F Rosemary Carstens, editor of the award-winning webzine FEAST, is writing a book about Mexico City artist Annette Nancarrow.
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Plum Cove, oil, 30 x 40.
brent jensen
Beyond the View Brent Jensen’s impressionistic brushwork calls forth the heart of his subjects B y R o s e ma r y C a r s t e n s
“Everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret,” said French Impressionist Camille Pissarro. California plein-air painter Brent Jensen has taken Pissarro’s advice to heart and applies his own unique talent to interpret the essence of his subjects. As he expresses it, “My pieces use a loose approach, limited palette, and objective perspective—allowing viewers to be
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Stonington Side Street, oil, 16 x 20.
drawn into the painting.” Jensen lives in Northern California, where he finds enormous variety in scenes to paint. A short drive in one direction, with his faithful beagle, Bosco, at his side, and he can set up his easel before a vista of pounding surf. Going in another direction, he finds the multihued geometry of Napa vineyards. “I’m equally comfortable painting landscapes, seascapes, figures, or architecturally interesting homes and buildings,” he notes. Raised in Wyoming, one of seven children, he freely roamed the state’s windswept foothills, and it is there he first fell in love with the natural world. He sketched constantly, and in the sixth
grade his drawing of an Eskimo spearing a polar bear won a statewide contest, setting him on the path to becoming a professional artist. Jensen took the slow road to his present vocation, however. At the University of Utah he earned a degree in art and, for the next two decades, made his living as an architectural illustrator, using watercolors to render precise images of proposed new homes and residential landscaping. By 2001 the illustration work began to feel repetitive and insufficiently challenging. When the opportunity arose to join a group of artists going to France to paint and study, he couldn’t resist.
There he met C.W. Mundy in the village of Angles-sur-l’Anglin in the Loire Valley. Jensen and Mundy connected immediately, and Mundy became one of his most significant mentors. “I knew as soon as I saw him, with a cigar in his hand, that we were going to get along!” says Jensen, admitting to his own secret vice of a fine cigar now and then.
Jensen constantly strives to balance composition and a scene’s emotional content, to express its character in a manner that will speak to others and pull them into a painting. He likes to “mix things up and try new things” and is continually learning, reading about
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art, taking workshops, and “pushing creativity.” In addition to Mundy, he has studied with Scott Burdick, Quang Ho, Kevin Macpherson, Jean Chambers, and Ray Roberts, among others. Jensen also studies the work of masters who have profoundly impressed him—artists such as Pissarro, Sam Hyde Harris, and muralist and landscape painter Alson Skinner Clark. A lively flurry of loose brush strokes, Jensen’s paintings energetically capture an emotion, not just a scene. At the same time there is a luminescent quality, a pure beauty, in each painting. His natural, fluid style evokes a mood as much as it portrays actual subjects. Says Diane Waterhouse of Waterhouse Gallery in Santa Barbara, CA: “Brent takes a simple subject and makes it compelling.” Jensen loves history, and a lingering nostalgia for the past seems to shimmer around his subjects. Among writers, he favors Hemingway, particularly his stories of the Spanish Civil War, and feels that artists and writers in the past
Vineyard and Palms, oil, 18 x 24.
brought a sense of contemplation to their work not often found in these more hectic times; he tries to replicate that sensibility in his own art. The artist’s appreciation of times past can be seen in his studio space, as well, where he surrounds himself with art books, old-fashioned hats, still-life stands, vases, pipes, odds and ends he’s collected on his travels, and the work of artists he admires. Oriental rugs on the floor offer Bosco a place to rest while Jenson paints. On warm days, a soft ocean breeze slips into the room as three large windows shed abundant light on his two easels. Jenson paints in oils on canvas—he likes the buttery texture and pungent smell of oils— and works on only one painting at a time. He first applies a medium-toned underpainting and then rapidly sketches in major shapes with a brush. As the painting progresses, he might sketch again, shifting shapes until he has the proportions and perspective he’s seeking. When he began his fine-art career, he used a very limited palette, but
he has since begun extending those hues as his knowledge as a colorist becomes more sophisticated. “My work is so personal to me that I don’t reproduce my paintings,” says Jensen. “Plus I think my collectors like to know they are the only one with that particular piece. I stay in touch with buyers. I find they like to have a conversation about a work, about where it was painted, what I was feeling or thinking, what inspired it. I like to honor that.” His collectors echo this sense of personal connection to his paintings. Lisa Davis and Victor Person have collected his work for years. “We like the feeling of calmness and serenity that his paintings convey. He has the ability to make you want to be present in the scene, to enjoy the experience he must have had while doing the painting,” says Person. “Brent’s art makes us feel good.” Although Jensen never tires of painting the sea, the wine country, and the architectural variety of the San Francisco Bay area, he also spends a great deal of time painting in other locales. He is deeply drawn to New England-style villages along the eastern seaboard and delights in the architecture, boats, and seaside scenes he encounters there. One of his own favorite paintings is PLUM COVE [see page 15], which he feels “captures the mood of the region and draws the viewer in.” It’s an enchanting scene: swathes of brilliant viridian stroked against sun-blasted golds, rigging thrusting delicately into the subtle colors of a welcoming spring sky, with a maelstrom of brush strokes reflected in the waters of a quiet shore. It speaks vividly of both the past and the present. “It was painted in the Cape Ann area of Massachusetts, in the city of Essex, where schooners are made. I liked the way the old worn ships were resting in the low tide along the grassy banks of the aging shipyard,” says the artist. On the same trip, Jensen ventured north to hauntingly beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then south along the winding coastline to tiny Lunenburg, one of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Canada, where Easter-egg colored houses with elaborately gabled roofs date back to the early 18th century. In the village of Chester, he came upon the scene portrayed in RUSTIC PARADISE [see page 18].
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“Once I saw it, nothing else mattered, and I knew I had to paint it,” he says. “The color of the weathered boathouse is unique, and I felt the cluttered equipment and workings of seasoned fishermen told a great story of the Maritime Provinces.” Another of the artist’s favorite places to paint is the Normandy region of France. He says he feels intensely connected to the French Impressionists when he’s there, and that it is very emotional for him to stand where they might once have stood and to paint a scene they might very well have painted. This fall he travels to New Zealand. And he looks forward to returning to Tuscany to paint the landscapes and villages he recalls from
visiting there as a tourist. A man who believes in goals and in striving for greater accomplishments, Jensen has plans to visit Russia and study Russian artists’ mastery of color and brushwork, to write more about art over the next few years, and to continue to evolve as an artist. Jensen is a member of Oil Painters of America and the American Impressionist Society, and his work is exhibited in galleries across the United States. Interest in collecting his paintings continues to grow, as does his mastery of the medium and his ability to create evocative impressions of his surroundings. Outside of the studio, Jensen enjoys gardening, reading classics, collecting
wines, and cooking. “Cooking is like art. You add a certain spice or seasoning to a dish and it completely changes the outcome, much like adding a dynamic stroke of color can change the emotional force of a painting,” he says. When he worked as an architectural illustrator, he found there was too much stress, too many deadlines. Now Jensen feels free to roam, to paint, and to fully express himself. He has come home to the path he was meant to travel. F Rosemary Carstens, editor of the award-winning webzine FEAST, is writing a book about Mexico City artist Annette Nancarrow, a contemporary of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Rustic Paradise, oil, 16 x 20.
This content has been abridged from an original article written by Rosemary Carstens. © F+W Media, Inc. All rights reserved. F+W Media grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.
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