Reilly Jensen’s Simple Stories

Review  by Alec Clayton published in Art Access, April 2003

Molar for Scott, oil on canvas 
by Reilly Jense

It has been a mere five years since Reilly Jensen turned her attention to painting after 20 years as a graphic artist. But in those five years she has learned lessons about painting that many artists learn only after a lifetime. She seems to own the surface of the canvas, manipulating it with layers of white and gray paint, and with other more brilliant but subtle colors bleeding through; and drawing into the wet surface with a variety of knives, all with a feeling of playful ease and sureness of execution, and without being overly controlled.

Jensen is not yet very well known. Those who are familiar with her work may be surprised at how she has toned down her palate, painting almost exclusively in shades of white, with value contrasts and subtle grays and blues and yellows glowing through a surface that looks like troweled cement. Incised into this surface are quirky and humorous line drawings, and superimposed words painted with liquid black oil paint. Most of the words relate to what Jensen calls the stories behind the paintings. Each painting in the series has its story, and all of her stories are personal (and usually light-hearted and with multiple meanings).

For instance, “shit or get off the pot” is about a friend Jensen says had been struggling with life decisions. She said that when thinking about her friend’s struggles it occurred to her that even small decisions can have huge impacts on our lives. This painting comments on anxieties brought on by having to make decisions such as whether or not to take a particular job or go into a particular field of study or enter into a personal relationship. It is painted almost entirely in shades of white, with pink stripes in the left hand corner next to a stack of toilet paper rolls. Layered over the toilet paper rolls — which are drawn, by the way, with lines reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s early graphic work — are fields of burning, translucent orange. Scraggly meandering lines that I at first thought were roads in a field as seen from an airplane take up the bottom right quarter of the painting. After long study I realized that this line drawing represented a toilet bowl. Scattered throughout the painting are words related to decision making and risk-taking representing the inner dialogue of someone wracked with indecision. In the upper right hand corner there are two figures poised on an edge. One is diving forward and the other is falling backwards. Finally, a tiny little circle indicating a risk-free zone illustrates just how momentous these decision-making processes can be.

Another example of the types of personal and quirky stories her paintings tell is the painting titled “molar for Scott.” Scott is an artist friend who, according to Jensen, collects “a lot of freaky stuff” like skulls and bones and bugs. Her friend Scott has done a lot of paintings with teeth in them, so Jensen decided to paint a large molar for her friend. The molar is drawn in outline with two lines that, as in “shit or get off the pot,” looks like a road. This “road” winds from top left past what looks to be plowed fields painted in tones of pink and orange, down across something that looks like either a railroad track or a stream as seen from high in the sky, and finally into a black square at bottom left where one side of the road vanishes and the other becomes a white-on-black line. This painting is loaded with drawings in a rough, graffiti-like style of bones, bugs and skulls. Even the horizontal line I described above as a river or train track turns out, upon closer inspection, to be a line of teeth strung together as in a necklace. It is all very macabre and humorous. There is some marvelously dense and free drawing along with warm colors that peek through heavy white paint with  — fittingly in this Halloween scene — a glow reminiscent of lighted candles in a jack-o-lantern.

Jensen spoke of the visual depth in these paintings and how much more difficult is was to create that depth than it had been in her earlier work. Depth came naturally in the earlier works, she said, because of value and hue contrasts that are lacking in the newer works. But depth is an important aspect of these paintings — not illusory depth as in naturalistic landscape, but the kind of shallow depth one sees in a collage where one image is laid over another and then partially torn away to reveal underlying images. There is also an interesting kind of peek-a-boo interplay of lines that at one point appear to be on the surface and another point appear to be behind it.

Another important aspect to her paintings is the asymmetrical placement of forms on the surface. She scatters words and images across the surface in groupings that are tenuously logical and barely in balance. The one exception to her seemingly random use of depth and balance is a painting titled “when i see you my feet fall off.” This is a classically balanced painting. Dead center at the top of the painting hangs a pair of legs with no feet. Below that and disconnected are the two feet that have fallen off, feet and pants forming a triangle. The logic and clarity of balance in this painting is augmented by an equally logical placement of objects on two planes. There is underpainting that is clearly on one plane and overpainting that is just as clearly on another plane. None of the other paintings in this series have this kind of logical structure.

There is a playful quality to all of these paintings that Jensen attributes to the influence of California artist Squeek Carnwath, who she said taught her that paintings don’t have to be about important subjects. Another influence Seattleites may more easily recognize is Larry Bemm, whose paintings are also very playful and who uses a similar palate. Well known for his shows at Bryan Ohno, Ballard Fetherston and Linda Cannon galleries, Bemm was compared to Clyfford Still by critic Mathew Kangas, “but with a great deal more informality suggestive of improvised drawing.”[1] It is the open field on their canvases, with not quite random placement of objects, along with that informal drawing, that Bemm and Jensen have in common. But Jensen’s drawing is more facile, with a feathery touch that reminds me of Arshile Gorky. And I detect in Jensen’s paintings a more serious intent hidden beneath a playful surface.

[1] Review in Art in America, November 2001


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© 2003 by Alec Clayton