Just Getting Started
Jo Jenner at Childhood's End
published in the Weekly Volcano, Jan. 2003
Certain images in art and life are loaded with Saccharine: sad clowns, big eyed children, lace and ribbons, flowers, poodles with bows -- these are (not) a few of my favorite things. When I was younger, I derisively called such sweetness in art Little Old Lady art.
It would be easy to think of Jo Jenner’s art as LOL Art. After all, she is a little old lady. She’s 90 years old. And there are definitely some Saccharine characteristics to her art. She uses a delicate washi paper from Japan in her collages, and fragile materials such as flower petals and cobwebs. Sweet colors such as lavender and yellow dominate her color schemes. But Jenner’s art can’t be passed off that easily. She has a strong sense of design and a nice sense of balance. Although she started making art late in life, Jenner has used her eyes long enough to develop a pretty good sense of what looks good. And her retrospective show at Childhood’s End Gallery in Olympia shows it. The show is called “Just Getting Started.”
“I hope you will come to ‘Just Getting started’ and see the mischief I’ve been up to in my 89th year,” Jenner wrote on the invitation, explaining, “I say I’m just getting started because I believe it. Every extra day on earth is for me a chance to work and learn and strive for beauty. That is a reward you get from art, no matter how old you are.”
Half of the gallery is taken up with earlier works going back to 1970. These are mostly collages, with a few Sumi prints. There are figures, landscapes and flowers (mostly semi-abstract) and a good number of pure abstract collages. The other half is filled with work done almost exclusively in the past year. It’s been a very busy year. The newer collages tend more toward the abstract and are less sweet. Overall I’d say about half are hits and half are misses, with more hits in the later works (which makes sense since she is, after all, just getting started).
“Self Portrait,” Sumi, is a hit. Drawn with an economy of freely looping lines, it is a happy face with a tilted head and a tilted smile and a bulb on the end of her nose that makes her look like a circus clown. Obviously Jo Jenner does not take herself too seriously.
“October,” collage, is one of her best abstract landscapes. There is a feeling of solidity to the earth. Although nothing can be identified as rock or ground or tree trunk, it feels like a desert scene. One feels the incredible heat of the orange sky. Shapes at the bottom look like a cross-section of the earth showing tunnels under the ground. Every form seems solidly locked into place, and the color combinations are deep and rich – especially that burning orange.
“Masqauarade,” collage, has just the right balance of abstraction and figuration. It is cute without being corny. One large, ripped piece of paper is pasted in the center. It goes from top to bottom, dividing the picture plane into three vertical shapes of almost equal size. Circular shapes are glued on either side of this, cleverly creating a peek-a-boo effect. They can be seen as two shapes on the same plane as the shape between them or as one large shape that is overlapped and sticks out on either side. A few smaller shapes, strategically placed, turn the image into a girl peeking out from behind a tree. Some artists have made careers out of this kind of trickery, and they make it seem too contrived. But Jenner makes it seem natural. With her, it’s the same kind of playful trickery Picasso was famous for -- not that Jenner is another Picasso, but by golly she has her moments.
© 2003 by Alec Clayton