BIOGRAPHY

Jenny Wilson is a professional musician and artist. She was a student at the High School of Art and Design in NYC and studied dance at the Alvin Ailey/Pearl Lang School in Manhattan. Interested in almost all aspects of visual and performing arts she eventually decided to pursue music as her profession. Jenny graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in Flute Performance. During that time Jenny worked as the art teacher at the Community School in Camden, Maine and also worked with the Camden Shakespeare Company as company musician. After graduating from the University of Maine Jenny went to Switzerland and studied flute at the Winterthur Konservatorium with Marianne Stucki and piano with ECM recording artist Art Lande. Her graduate studies in music brought her to West Virginia where she earned her Master of Music degree. She accepted a teaching position at the Morgantown Learning Academy as their music and art teacher and was an adjunct in the music department of the University of Maryland in Frostburg. Jenny currently teaches private music lessons and workshops. Her paintings are in private collections and in juried exhibits across the country. Her painting "Broke Down Fences" won third place in the West Virginia Division of Culture and History Emerging Artists Exhibition 2018 and was purchased for the collection in Charleston, WV.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My paintings are best described as contemporary landscape or contemporary abstract. I am very focused on the natural world of plants, clouds, sea and sky. My work has been described as "evocative", "elegant", "a feeling of being in the picture". Sometimes my work has a quality of stillness, as in a frozen winter's afternoon or heavy humid sunlight. Recently I have begun to work in water color and I find the improvisational aspect of the medium gels with my background as a jazz musician. Passion for color and texture are what excite me about painting. Exploring the geography of my imagination becomes the realization of an image, possibilities become choices and the final product is the outcome of many decisions along the journey. As a musician and composer by training, my painting gives me the opportunity to reverse direction- music is a temporal art that only moves forward. Painting allows me to stop time, to make choices in slow motion and to experience the art of composing in a whole new way. I am informed by my musical knowledge – gradations of tone color, balance, tension and release, rhythm all play into how I compose a painting. My background in art includes a good deal of drawing. Drawing is an important element in my painting. I try to incorporate marks that allude to the structure of the piece and that give some architecture to the image. Layering paint is also an important to my process. I will activate the blank canvas with bold strokes that give me a structure to play upon. I often view painting as music unwinding itself and coming to some harmonic conclusion upon the canvas.