Jenny Chisholm`s work represents an ongoing endeavour to explore and understand the energy of colour and contrast, the nature of the spontaneous mark and the process by which a painting is translated from mind to canvas. Her style as an artist is constantly evolving and mutating, whilst maintaining a fascination with the portrait as a vehicle through which light and shade, colour and contrast, space, spontaneity and repetition can be investigated and displayed.
Her compositions reflect an interest in the process of cognition and how it translates to the canvas; the transformation from subject, to charcoal, to paint. She re-works and repeats by drawing the same image many times over in charcoal, helping to depict a truer understanding of the spontaneous mark. The speed at which she creates these charcoal images is crucial, as it is the momentum which it is created that enables incidental marks and loose traces of line to meld together and provide ideas for the final composition. As the process continues, the brain’s ability to store and reiterate information becomes integral to my concept of ‘spontaneity’.
Together with the use of repetition to generate originality, she takes advantage of the maneuverability and sculptural nature of paint, using heavily hung impasto oils to celebrate and flaunt the possibilities of paint in its own right. She is drawn to contrasting and conflicting colours, and takes inspiration for both subject matter and colour from a wide variety of sources: swatches from landscape photographs, pictures from newspapers and magazines, and often material from within her family circle. The paintings that result from such techniques represent the evolving nature of her work and challenge the boundaries of conventional portraiture.