Contemporary tonalist oil paintings that combine luminist old master’s techniques with current day forms and materials.
Born and raised in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, Jennifer Tazewell has a very personal relationship with the subject matter she depicts. “Ultimately, my landscape paintings are about our relationship with time as experienced through our epic environment. I believe that our experience of this place creates a tension within us that lives between the recognition of our own mortality and seeming timelessness of the land”.
Tazewell’s oil paintings capture the space and breadth of the West Coast landscape and the great vistas of water, earth, and sky. The artist calls these works “tapestry landscapes” because the under layers contain a woven-like texture that alludes to the continuum of history, the fabric of civilization, and the threads of time weaving together and then slowly unravelling.
These paintings further the tonalist landscape painting tradition that grew out of the French Barbizon School of the 1800’s, imported to North America with the Hudson River School, and then moved west with the California Tonalists into the early 1900’s. In keeping with tonalist traditions, the central figure in the work is light – in particular the ephemeral moment when a shift in atmospheric conditions fleetingly transforms the landscape. As contemporary tonalist paintings Tazewell’s works merge the old with the new, drawing on traditional luminist painting techniques reaching back to the 1600′s with present day forms and materials. As images they owe a debt to early 19th century landscape photography by Edward Steichen.
Her gestural monotype prints which are abstracted botanicals reference Asian calligraphy brush work while also being connected to the legacy of autonomic and expressionist painting. As gestural renderings, they are also in dialogue with the tradition of botanical illustrations and Audubon’s masterful avian imagery.
The artist holds a Master of FIne Arts degree and has been selling and exhibiting her artwork for over ten years. She is regularly commissioned to create large format works for new real estate developments. Tazewell is represented in Seattle, USA by Artforte Gallery, and Roam Gallery in Canada. For more information email studio@jtazewell.com.