Jennifer Chaney grew up exploring the sensuous marshes and islands on the Mississippi coast — an environment that would become basis of her visual language. A 2003 graduate of University of Montevallo — where she received a Bachelor’s degree in Art, Chaney’s most recent work is born in dreams, painted after her two young children were finally put to bed. Like so many artists who are also mothers, her work is inspired by her children’s delight in discovering the world and their inner freedom, rekindling her own deep connection to landscapes.
“Impressions of memories are captured with pigments and minerals coaxed through water on paper and canvas with brush work, surface tension, and gravity,” says Chaney. “The push and pull between controlling the paint and also relinquishing control to evaporation and movement echos the ideas that we must accept what we cannot change and try to embrace a lack of control.”
Those same tensions exist in her three most recent series: Abstract Internal Landscapes, dreamy landscapes, and landscape portraits. The past, the future, chaos, control, the embrace of experience as identity have found new resonance in her work which builds an oblique pathway inspired by sumi-e ink wash paintings, American landscapes, and Rococo aesthetics. Each painting writhes with possibility: It’s trying to fathom what could’ve been — or what’s next — that will hold your gaze.