July 10-August 10: Jennifer Rosengarten – Before Gardens/After Gardens

Jennifer Rosengarten: Before Gardens/After Gardens. Click any thumbnail to launch viewer.

Jennifer Rosengarten has been drawing since she can remember and painting not long after.

Jennifer graduated from Wright State University with a major in Fine Arts in 1989, studying there with David Leach and Diane Fitch among others. From there she went to the Artist Residency Program at Vermont Studio School studying with Bernard Chaet and Wolf Kahn before heading to Boston University, with a full fellowship, to study painting. At BU she worked with John Walker, Anne Harris, and John Moore. She completed her MFA in 1993, and upon graduating she was awarded the prestigious Esther B. Kahn Career Entry Award.

She is represented by Skyline Gallery in Houston, TX. She has shown her work in several galleries on the east and west coast including Hera Gallery and the Native Gallery in Providence, RI, the Munson Gallery in Santa Fe, NM and the Eclectic Gallery in Gig Harbor, WA. In addition, Jennifer has shown her work on a number of college and university campuses including Earlham College, Georgia Southern, Valdosta State, and Brown University.

Her home and studio are located in Yellow Springs, OH and she currently teaches all levels of drawing and painting at the University of Dayton. The main impetus behind Jennifer’s work is an interest in space both metaphorical and physical. Recently she has looked to gardens as a means to explore how a sense of place is evocative of mood, memory and transition.

About Her Work
The act of painting and drawing for me are a kind of conversation, a way for me to interact with and “know” my subject. The true nature of the subject – my interpretation of it, anyway – is revealed through the process of working with and being led by both the intrinsic quality of the materials and a response to the energies on the canvas as it evolves.

I hope to capture what Anne Morrow Lindbergh called “the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.” That contradiction – between the individual moment and the ever forward flow of time and its accumulated history – is what is truly engaging for me in the work. I want to liberate a glimpse that might otherwise be lost to the past even as it disappears.

To arrest the moment requires observation and contemplation but is no passive objective recording of events, but a search for truth filtered through the lens of individual experience. Basho, a Zen monk and poet, wrote, “What is important is to keep the mind high in the world of true understanding, then, returning to daily experience, seek therein the true and the beautiful. No matter what the activity of the moment, we must never forget it has a bearing on our everlasting self….”

Jennifer Rosengarten’s work will be on view at Glen House Inn B&B from July 10-August 10, with an artist’s salon on Sunday, July 30, from 6-10pm. The public is invited to the salon, and to view the exhibitions Sundays from 1-4pm.