My painting is rooted in a place…but as a general matter I am not a faithful copyist of the everyday.
“Yellow Skirt, Brooklyn, 2014,” oil on linen, 52 x 78 inches. © Elisa Jensen. Image courtesy of the artist.
A young woman walks at a rapid clip. It is a winter day and she is on Nassau Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in front of a brick wall that has been marked both by the passage of time and multiple taggers. The graffiti that surrounds the girl—spray painted arabesques, a pumpkin, two hearts and a skeleton—could easily be her thoughts made manifest. A pair of chained-up bicycles join a discarded Christmas tree in bearing witness as they lean against the wall.
My painting is rooted in a place—Brooklyn, at the moment—but as a general matter I am not a faithful copyist of the everyday. I’ve seen some of the tags in my paintings on the street, but most of the images have been moved and manipulated. Some of the symbols I paint have been taken from older kinds of graffiti, including Neolithic rock carvings at the Loughcrew passage graves in Ireland and those on Bornholm in Denmark.
My painting is rooted in a place…but as a general matter I am not a faithful copyist of the everyday.
And speaking of combining the ancient and the modern, I see a tremendous connection between what’s happening on the corner of Nassau and Manhattan Avenue and The Book of Kells, the Lindesfarne Gospels, and the Book of Durrow. In all four of those sources words and images have been merged to create incredible rhythms, riddles and mysteries that can only be explained to the eye.
Editor’s Recs:
For more information on Elisa Jensen’s painting, visit her website at www.elisajensen.com.
Elisa Jensen’s current show at The Painting Center will be up until November 23.
More information here.
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