Jean Nerenberg's water media paintings at the Tucson Jewish Community Center Fine Art Gallery

painting by Jean Nerenberg

Local artist Jean Neremberg has some very nice colorful water media work at the Fine Art Gallery at the Tucson Jewish Community Center. Unfortunately, the exhibit will be closed by the time you read this.  The gallery at the JCC is a great place to see art, mainly because of its huge skylight, and tall glass windows, which provide for ample natural light, which is what's needed to really appreciate her colorful paintings.

I can tell, just by looking at her paintings, that she works in a very exploratory and inquisitive way. It reminds me of the way I paint, so I can relate to her creative process here. It looks like she starts by laying down colors, shapes, and marks, and just seeing what it becomes, seeing what it reminds her of. Only later does she shape her initial marks  into recognizable subject matter.

The mountains in piece pictured above is made out of amorphous colors, shapes, and marks, without any regard for "reality", for this is a work of discovery and imagination. When you get your face right into this work, there is a lot of variety to really appreciate: from hard-edged shapes, to soft diffuse marks, to experiments with pattern....it's really a rich piece, and a real pleasure to look at.

In the piece above, she's restricted her palette to just a few colors (orange, blue, purple, and ochre), and that's enough for my tastes; any more colors, and the work would become too cluttered. For the most part, most of her work has very vibrant color matched against softer pastel colors, and she likes to work with color complements. Thus, you'll see blue and orange as the predominant colors in one painting, and magenta and olive green in another. Her use of color complements (that is, colors on opposite sides of the color wheel) give her paintings a vibrancy and a sense of excitement.

Here subject matter is also interesting. She has two kinds of subject matter here: amorphous landscapes, and geometric cosmic paintings.  The geometric cosmic paintings are have a lot of round shapes, which are arranged as if they are planets, while angles cut through the picture, chopping up the space, but also service as a organizational structure.   I find this work really interesting, and very well done.

painting by Jean Nerenberg

In her artist's statement, she writes: "ideas for paintings evolve as the paint flows on the paper or canvas.  Jean wants to capture the excitement of the creative process by working with the irregular and accidental properties of the medium, rather than glossing over or correcting them".

This is some of the strongest work I've seen at the JCC's art gallery in a long time.  I feel that her stronger pieces are those which have rich color and interesting shapes. I like how she's taken random shapes and splatters, and turned them into mountainscapes, and solar systems.  Nice work! A pleasure to look at!