News
Lecturer
Les Peintres Impressionists en AnglaisAlliance Francaise
1345 Bush Street
San Francisco, CA
Wednesdays, July 7-August 25, 2010
Book
"The Curie Family Investigate the Crab Nebula" painting from my Women Scientists series is on the cover of Gwyneth Jones' new book, "Imagination: Space" published November 2009 by Aqueduct Press.
Magazine
My portrait of Rosa Parks is featured in Direct Art Magazine, Volume 17.
Award
My portrait of Coco Chanel is an Artslant 4th 2010 Showcase Winner in Painting.
Future Work
Working with Adaptive Edge, a creative futures think-tank, for a Multi-Generational Art Project that includes Night*Time Stories.
Biography
Born in Salem, Oregon as Jennifer Wilkinson. I live in San Francisco.
Autodidact by nature, I created my independent painting classes while studying Philosophy at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. During my studies, I won the President’s Award, the school’s top art prize and received a grant for a 4’ x 7’ painting which was on the yearbook cover and is now in the college’s permanent collection. I was the second woman in the college’s history to receive honors in Philosophy in 1993 and the only one to do so without taking a class in my thesis topic (metaphysics and Spinoza).
Art doesn’t care if you’re man or woman. One thing you have to have is talent, and you have to work like mad.
~ Alice Neel
After college, I continued to paint (sometimes in heated conditions) while working as a residential counselor for teenage girls then as a writer for an adventure travel magazine, traveling to Italy and India on assignment. While working as a temp for an ad agency, I was hired as a copywriter. The job only lasted eight months, but I was able to freelance for five years, working in all forms of advertising (my copy is still on Widmer's Wildwood Hard Cider) and where I learned how to write stories through scripts and the importance of character development. On moving to San Francisco, I left advertising writing to focus on painting and my creation of a multimedia franchise to teach girls science. Currently, I am teaching a class on the Impressionists at the Alliance Francaise (en anglais) and working with Adaptive Edge, a creative futures think tank.
Dedicated hobbies are making Absinthe and doing Aromatherapy, which is like Nature's secret science solution that hardly anyone knows about.
In my work, I do portraiture influenced by the purity of color, as well as by philosophy, science and storytelling.
I use oil, acrylic and wax pastel to explore the faces of iconoclasts I admire. I like juxtaposing complementary colors, layering the medium to create a textural topography of each face. All my work is drawn free-hand, where I use photographs as a guide. In the mixed-media pieces, I use water-soluble wax pastels and acrylic on unstretched canvas. I like the tension between seemingly incongruent colors and materials and the physical texture of rough surface between mediums. In the oil paintings, I try to maintain the opacity and thickness of pure color by using a dry brush. Besides canvas, I like the familiarity between oil and wood that can bring out the colors in unusual textural ways.Although some of my subjects are famous, I am more interested in the obscure. I am inspired by true individualism. Especially those whose self-determinism defied odds with a vision that expanded the boundaries of how we think, thereby influencing the cultural mind.
In every piece, the authenticity of the message is related to craft. I want my work to look like it has taken time.
The subject dictates the medium and the form, ranging from traditional portraits, to conceptual, to participatory installation art.
My collection of women scientists represents the triumph of emotion in the most rational male bastion: science. I iconicized these women with pop color portraits incorporating their work and stories to reveal the true genius of each woman and their love of science.
My current work involves storytelling as the receptive in listening. Night*Time Stories is an assertion of American cultural values we have never lost, storytelling and portraiture; inviting participation to join in these traditions through an experience most have never had, but is still part of our collective historical notion of American family life. It is what I call Slow Art; an experience that invites people to "slow down" and take an active part in another's memory, which Walter Benjamin states as participating in the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation.
Mixed Media
Portraits are watercolor wax pastel & acrylic on 18" x 24" canvas.
Hover over an image for name and details. Click on any image to enlarge.
After Arbus
2007
Coco Chanel
2009
Billie Holiday
2007
Diane Diprima
2009
Mal Sharpe
2009
Edgar Degas
2008
Edgar Manet
2008
Berthe Morisot
2008
Frank Sinatra
2008
Rosa Parks
2008
Steve Mcqueen
2008
little edie
2009
Robert Johnson
2008
Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington
2008
Holly Go Lightly
2008
John Lennon
2008
Bluto Blutarsky
2008
Jean-Michel Basquiat
2007
Paul Cezanne
2009
Ted Rheingold
2008
Claude Monet
2008
David Hockney
2008
Chuck Close
2008
Simone DeBeauvoir
2007
Albert Camus
2007
Jimmy Carter
2008
Sinatra
2007
Audrey Hepburn
2007
Louise Bourgeois
2007
Alice Neel
2007
Women Scientists
This series explores women scientists and their contributions, integrated into the pieces itself and detailed on the brass engraving.
These women advanced science and did so against all odds and even against prevailing scientific opinion.
click on any image to enlarge
Marie Geoppert-Mayer
Physicist 1906-1972
She won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963 for her discoveries concerning the meaning of the magic numbers (nuclei with a special number of protons). She established mathematically that these numbers are the nuclear counterpart to the closed shells of electrons at the atomic level.
Marie on the move in her magic numbers hat.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Astrononomer 1868-1961
In her career at Harvard College Observatory, she discovered more than 2,400 variable stars. She saw a direct correlation between the time it took a star to go from bright to dim and the star's actual brightness. Knowing this relationship helped other astronomers, such as Edwin Hubble, make their own groundbreaking discoveries. Henrietta models a distant galaxy.
Elizabeth Blackwell
Medical Doctor 1821-1934
She was the first woman awarded a medical degree in the United States. No hospital would employ her, so in 1853 she opened a dispensary in a tenement district of NYC, which later became the New York Infirmary of Women and Children. she was a visionary doctor who worked for those in the poorest conditions.
Elizabeth sports a 19th century travel stethoscope.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Chemist 1910-1994
In 1964, she was the third woman to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Her three greatest chemical achievements were her determination of the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, the vitamin that prevents pernicious anemia and insulin, the hormone essential for carbohydrate metabolism.
Dorothy dazzles in her formula for Vitamin B-12.
Rosalind Franklin
Chemist 1920-1957
A bold physical chemist, Rosalind's groundbreaking crystallographic techniques led to important discoveries in plant viruses and coal. Although she was not honored, her photographs of DNA gave the experimental proof for the Nobel Prize-winning double helix model.
Rosalind shines in her double helix necklace.
Chien Shing Wu
Physicist 1912-1997
In 1957, she devised the experiment which disproved the law of conservation of parity-an amazing feat in physics. She was the first woman to receive the Comstock Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1964. After all this success, she moved into medical research to study sickle cell anemia.
Chien dresses up a sickle cell slide.
Marie Curie
Physicist and Chemist 1867-1934
She was a pioneering scientist who won the Nobel Prize twice. She was awarded in 1903, sharing the Nobel Prize in physics with her husband, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the discovery of radium and polonium. In 1911, she was the first woman to win the Noble Prize in chemistry, by herself, for the isolation of pure radium.
Marie radiates in the green glow of radium.
Emmy Noether
Mathematician 1882-1936
She developed the basis for group theory, which is the mathematics behind the representation of all modern physics. At her death, Einstein wrote in her obituary: Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.
Emmy works her algebraic formula as a bowtie.
Kathleen Yardley Lonsdale
Chemist 1903-1971
She solved a 64-year contention in chemistry by confirming experimentally the ring structure of benzene, the aromatic compound responsible for scent. She also gave the structure's precise molecular dimensions. In 1945, she was the first woman to be elected to fellowship in the Royal Society, which had excluded women for 285 years. Kathleen looking clever in her benzene ring glasses.
Beatrix Potter
Mycologist, writer 1866-1943
Before becoming a storybook writer, she studied fungi, creating over 270 detailed watercolors now on display in the Armitt Library in Ambleside, England. She kept a private journal written in code, which wasn't published until 1966 because no one could break it. Once broken, it took the decoder seven years to decipher.
Beatrix can't wait to play with her dog Spot.
Barbara McClintock
Geneticist 1902-1992
She received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1983 for showing that genes could transpose (move around) within chromosomes. This so-called "jumping gene" taught her that stress and the genome's reaction to it underlie our evolution. Her revolutionary understanding came from studying simple grains of maize.
Barbara poses with her maize.
Lise Meitner
Physicist 1878-1968
She gave the first theoretical explanation of the fission process. While exiled in Stockholm during the second world war, she kept in constant collaboration with her partner in chemistry, Otto Hahn. Although the Nobel Committee overlooked her vital contribution, the element Meitnerium, a transuranian element, is named after her.
Lise basks in the sparks of fission.
Maria Mitchell
Astronomer 1818-1889
She won the gold medal in a competition held by the King of Denmark to discover a new comet in 1847. Mitchell's comet is now identifies as C/1847 tl. In 1848, she was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873.
Maria's comet streaks through her hair.
Agnes Pockels
Physicist, Fluid Dynamics 1862-1935
With no more than a public high school education for girls, she pioneered the study of surface film physics. Remarkably, she did this out of her own home, studying with her brother's physics books, while taking care care of her sick parents. The surface balance technique Pockels developed is still used today.
Agnes relaxes with her surface tension blouse.
The Curie Family Investigate the Crab Nebula
Marie Curie (1867-1934), Pierre Curie (1859-1906), Irene Joliot-Curie (1897-1956) Frederic Joliot-Curie (1900-1958)
The magnetic field near the Crab Nebula is 900 billion times stronger than the Earth's. The average density of Crab Nebula material is the same as a sugar cube containing every American automobile. Imagine the weight of 100 billion cars in a one-centimeter cube. This same density is found in every atomic nucleus in your body.
Grande
- Hover over an image for name and details. Click on any image to enlarge.
Empryean
oil on 7 canvases, arizona flagstones
4.8' x 8 2008
Gilbert and George
oil on red oak
19" x 24" (2) 2008
Gandhi
oil & acrylic on canvas
4.5' x 7.5' 2007
Bill and Betty
oil on canvas
11" x 14" 2006
Luc Tuymans
oil on masonite
15.25" x 26.5" 2008
Madonna & Grandchild
oil on found wood, rock, staples
31" x 43" 2006
Madonna
oil on found wood
18" x 26" 2005
Only One Out Of Ten Of You Girls Can Ever Hope To Marry You Will Have To Make Your Way In This World As Best You Can
oil on masonite
15.25" x 26.5"2008
Vinnie
oil on linen
31.5" x 23.5" 2006
Camille Claudel
oil on red oak
19" x 24" (2) 2009
Petite
- Hover over an image for name and details. Click on any image to enlarge.
Werner Heisenberg
oil on canvas
11" x 14" 2006
Einstein and Curie Walk in a Nebula
oil on canvas
24" x 18" 2007
Welcome
oil on board
12" x 16" 2009
Matisse and Muse
oil on board
12" x 16" 2009
Bonjour!
oil on board
12" x 16" 2009
After
oil on board
12" x 16" 2009
Streetwalker
oil on board
12" x 16" 2009
Secrets
oil on board
12" x 16" 2009
Amsterdam
acrylic on board
9" x 12" 2008
San Francisco
acrylic on board
9" x 12" 2008
Fuck yah!
oil on board
9" x 12" (2) 2009
Carson McCullers
oil on wood
16" x 18" 2009
"Storytelling does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the hand print of the potter cling to the clay vessel."
~ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
I remember hearing about a remarkable day in Brooklyn, New York. A local nursing home set up a row of rocking chairs along a whole block and in each chair rocked an elderly person. Soon, children from the neighborhood came to the chairs, and climbed up in old laps to be held and told a story. So many kids came, the line wrapped around the building twice.
We have an ingrained need to hear stories and we all know that the elders have not forgotten our common thread like we have forgotten our elders.
Night*Time Stories is an assertion of American cultural values we have never lost, storytelling and portraiture; inviting participation to join in these traditions through an experience most have never had, but is still part of our collective historical notion of American family life. It is what I call Slow Art; an experience that invites people to "slow down" and take an active part in another's memory, which Walter Benjamin states as participating in the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation.
Choosing radical Bay Area elders to be the storytellers; I recorded Mal Sharpe, Diane DiPrima, Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin and Ann Shulgin with binaural microphones so with headphones, participants can hear the 360-degree sound of their stories. Each storyteller has a porch, made from salvaged wood, with a roof divet that houses "Laser Stars," which creates a holographic, animated starry sky.
Imagine walking into a gallery and it is night-time, with a starry sky illuminating the ceiling. Lit up cozily against the wall is a life-size, wooden porch. On the porch are two rocking chairs, with one rocking on its own. You step up on the porch to find the moving chair is the storyteller, painted on the back of the chair. Sitting in the opposite rocker, you put on the headphones, start the iPod and begin listening to the storyteller's stories.
Settling down for a Night*Time Story, rocking and listening transports you into a different world. Memory interacts with both visual and aural senses, allowing a deeper understanding of the storyteller. When it’s over, you carry with you the story and the art of storytelling lives on.
Porch design by architect Benjamin Farrell.
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- 1. DiPrima’s guide to LSD
- 2. Sharpe, surrealism & the Foot Apple
- 3. Sasha’s fav drugs & how to take them
- 4. Ann considers GOD
- 5. Squeeky wee wee
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Diane DiPrima
Poet (b. 1934)
Diane Di Prima is the first, and probably most important, woman writer of the Beat Movement. She is the author of 44 books of poetry and prose, and has been translated into over 20 languages. An expanded edition of her classic, Revolutionary Letters, was recently published by Last Gasp Press. Opening to the Poem, essays and exercises to access the creative process in everyone, will be published by Penguin in 2009. Diane has just been named Poet Laureate of San Francisco. She lives and teaches in the Bay area.
Mal Sharpe
Performer (b. 1936)
In the early 1960s, Sharpe teamed with Jim Coyle to create a series of comic on-the-street interviews for San Francisco radio station KGO. They released 2 comedy albums of street pranks in 1964 for Warner Brothers. As a solo performer, he later released 2 albums and continued as a solo interviewer with a syndicated TV series, The Street People. In the 1980’s he hosted a series of public television specials, Mal Sharpe’s San Francisco. Now he hosts a jazz show on KCSM and plays trombone in his Dixieland jazz band, The Big Money In Jazz Band.
Alexander Shulgin
Chemist (b. 1925)
Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, Ph.D., is a pharmacologist and chemist known for his creation of new psychoactive chemicals. He has synthesized and bioassayed (self-tested) hundreds of psychoactive chemicals, recording his work in four books and more than two hundred papers. In 1967, he was introduced to the possibilities of MDMA (ecstasy) by an undergrad at San Francisco State University. Though Shulgin didn’t invent the chemical, he did create a new synthesis process in 1976, which led to hundreds of therapists using the material in therapy.
Ann Shulgin
Writer (b. 1931)
With her husband Sasha, she has co-authored the books PiHKAL and TiHKAL, and is currently working on a forthcoming book on cactus quinoline alkaloids. As a researcher and writer she worked with psychedelics such as MDMA and 2C-B before they were scheduled in 1985. Her unique and valuable insights into the beneficial effects psychedelics can have in therapeutic contexts have tremendous value to researchers continuing with such work.
Grandpa Story
My Grandpa would tell stories to his kids and Grandkids about Squeeky Wee Wee. Sometimes it was a squirrel, or a kitten, but Squeeky was always the runt of the family and always got in trouble because he forgot to pay attention. On excursions to Diamond Lake, Oregon, where my Grandpa loved to fish in his hand-built boats, my brothers and I would get treated to a Squeeky Wee Wee story every night. My uncle recorded my Grandpa in 1975 and I had the stories remastered to create the first storyteller in my series. With the rocking chair experience, I can listen to the easy cadence in his voice again. I have a living heirloom of my most beloved and missed soul.