JENNIFER BALKAN

My paintings are emotionally-based psychological narratives where the details lie in planes of color. I choose to exaggerate color, in a sense break up a color field into its constituent colors, directing the viewer to particular areas by applying juicy bits of heavily saturated color. I strive to capture emotional states more than anything else, purposefully laying strokes down to create the illusion of an outer physical topography that houses an inner one of the soul. Though it is a cerebral concept that motivates me, the process of painting is superior to all else. Once I begin a painting, my interaction with the panel takes on a life of its own; it transcends whatever I can actually say about the painting once it is finished. Like some kind of meditation, I always hope to remain in this state during the entirety of my painting experience through life's chatter gets in the way at times. When I can exist in that sweet place for much of the time when I am painting, I can say that my work is honest.

Although Jennifer had drawn her entire life, she did not embrace her passion to paint until 2001. Jennifer grew up in one of the countless suburbs of New Jersey in between the Holland Tunnel and the Jersey Shore which spawned her affection and curiosity for all things carnivalesque. Jennifer studied behavioral neuroscience at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. After graduation, she worked her way out west to Seattle after a brief stay in Boulder where she found people not afraid to speak their minds while working in a rat lab. In Seattle, Jennifer worked serving the mentally ill and developmentally disabled population. From Seattle, she was pulled to Austin to study Latin American sociology at the University of Texas. Jennifer attained a Ph.D. in 2001 after conducting anthropological fieldwork on human migration in Chiapas, Mexico in 1999. Although her experience in Mexico was rich, Jennifer longed for artistic creativity. In 2002, Jennifer quit her full-time job doing social scientific research and threw herself into oil painting, and now paints fervently. Jennifer has taken art classes at Laguna Gloria Art School, the Austin Fine Arts School, and at the Art Students League in Denver. Jennifer continues to find inspiration in many innovative painters who include friends both near and far. Jennifer’s greatest creation is her son Karlo who was born in 2009. Jennifer feels incredibly lucky and constantly humbled as she gets to see the world through his eyes. Jennifer realizes now that her time studying the human psyche both psychologically and sociologically must have left its imprint on her brain permanently…because she cannot seem to stray too far from it in her painting. She currently paints in her studio and in life painting groups. Jennifer has been teaching figure and portrait painting in oils to private groups of students since 2005. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and in Europe and has been featured in a number of national and international art publications. Jennifer’s portraits have received awards from the Portrait Society of America. She was named “Best Visual Artist of 2015” by the Austin Chronicle Readers’ Poll. In 2016, Jennifer was invited by the Academy of Realist Art in Boston, to participate in their figure painting competition. In 2017, she was included in Fine Art Connoisseur Magazines photo essay on leading contemporary figurative painters. In 2018, Jennifer was nominated by the Austin Critics Table for Austin’s Best Visual Artist. When not painting, Jennifer is adventuring through life with her son Karlo and husband Jeff either on a bicycle or unicycle.

WORKS