Jackie Battenfield
Jackie Battenfield uses painting to create luminous works of natural forces & fauna. Battenfield received a BS at Pennsylvania State University. She earned his Masters in Fine Arts from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University 1978. Her work is in the collections of the Montclair Art Museum, New York Public Library, and the Palmer Museum of Art, among others. Her work is represented in over 500 collections worldwide including: The New York Public Library, New York; The Zimmerli Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Palmer Museum, Pennsylvania; and the United States Embassy Collections, Brazil, Cambodia, Croatia, Jamaica, and Peru.
E X H I B I T I O N S
Solo & Two Artist Shows
2024 (Upcoming) Jackie Battenfield & Margot Glass, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent CT
2023 Shimmer, Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Washington, DC
2022 Summer Blooms, Gallery 1781, Chicago, IL
2021 White Light, Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Washington, DC
Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, CT
2019 One Fine Day, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
2018 Chasing the Sky: Jackie Battenfield & Jennifer Falck Linssen
Chicago Art Source, Chicago, IL
2017 Branched, Jackie Battenfield & Julia Bloom, Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Washington, D.C.
2015 Mirage, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
2014 Another Garden, Wave Hill, Bronx, New York
2013 Town & Country, Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art, Sarasota, FL (with Deborah Brown)
2012 Field Notes, Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Washington, D.C.
2011 Moments of Change, University of Arizona Museum, Tucson, AZ
Mark Humphrey Gallery, Southampton, NY
2009 Moments of Change, Prints by Jackie Battenfield
Joel & Lila Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA
Selected Group Shows
2019 Forest Bathing, University of Chicago Medicine, Healing Arts Program, Chicago, IL
Thrive, Kenise Barnes Fine Art/CT, Kent, Connecticut
Petal Power: Hope Springs Eternal, OSilas Gallery at Concordia College, Bronxville NY
2018 Crazy Beautiful III, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
Flower Power, ODETTA|Garvey|Simon Fine Art, New York, NY
2017 Art in Bloom, Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, CT
2016 Flower Power, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
Night and Day the River Flows: Waterscapes from the Harnett Print Study Center Collection, Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond, VA
Luminous, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
2015 Nature Transformed, Chicago Art Source, Chicago, IL
Summer Show, DM Contemporary, New York, NY
Natural Allusions, Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Washington, D.C.
Sense of Place, Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, Richmond, VA
2013 You Never Know Just How it Looks Through Other People’s Eyes Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
The Summer Show, DM Contemporary, NY, NY
Plumbing the Depths, Addington, Gallery, Chicago, IL
Silhouette, EFA Project Space, NY, NY
Light & Life: Contemporary Landscape, 222 East 41st Street Space, New York, NY
2012 ♥+ Art, DM Contemporary, New York, New York
S E L E C T E D C O L L E C T I O N S
The American College of Greece, Athens, GR
Babson College, Boston, MA
Davis, Polk & Wardwell, New York
Dow Jones & Co. Inc., Princeton, NJ
Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA
Harvey Fierstein, Ridgefield, CT and New York, NY
Dr. Werner Ganz, Bern, Switzerland
Grant Thornton International, San Francisco & New York
Hong Kong Regent Hotel, Hong Kong
Jinling Tower, Nanjing, China
IBM, Armonk, NY
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
New York Public Library, NYC
New York University, Langone Center, NY
Osaka Hyatt Hotel, Osaka, Japan
Palace Hotel, Beijing, China
Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, PA
Progressive Corporation, Cleveland, OH
Sasaki Collection, Tokyo, Japan
United States of America, Department of State, Embassy Collections
Lima, Peru: Sao Paolo, Brazil: Zaghreb, Croatia; Phnom Penh, Cambodia
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona
University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, VA
The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
Wave Hill, Riverdale, New York
These paintings draw upon two natural but disparate processes: the gestural unfolding and leafing of a branching tree limb, and the physical properties and behaviors of pigments. My intention is to recreate conditions under which I intimately observe natural forces.
My fascination with trees has been life-long. Most recently it originated from a week I spent at a rural silent meditation retreat. Spring was slowly awakening the landscape from its winter bareness. Each day I sat next to a window in meditative silence. As my city mindset quieted, I was transfixed as tender buds and leaves daily transformed a gnarly elm tree outside. I was also reminded of my childhood. To escape from my large rowdy family, I would grab a book and take off for the woods and fields surrounding my neighborhood. Sitting in the cool shadows with my back against a tree, I’d get lost in my reading and dream about the future while looking up through the sheltering tree canopy above. I’d study the intricate shapes of the leaves and branches, and the designs created by the play of sunlight through the boughs. It was my time to fantasize about faraway places. My paintings evoke the immediacy of that experience as my paintbrush slowly reanimates the twisting and branching drawn line of a tree limb.
The paintings originate from photographs I take while walking around my city or traveling. Using these images as a starting point, I carefully draw them onto the large sheets of translucent Mylar, taking care to stay true to the original image. I have found that nature, as it is, is far more exciting than any tree or branch I could conjure.
Not so with the painting’s color. I freely play with the artificial – a blue branch, a gigantic salmon hued gingko leaf, candy colored yellow-green maple. Here I explore shifting pigments, vivid colors juxtaposed with fragile veils, and transparent layers in contrast to dense clotted pools of color.
I work with acrylic paint thinned to an ink-like consistency and my brush entices puddles of it onto the skeletal branches, leaf clusters and flower petals. As the liquid paint dries, the individual pigments reassert themselves, separating and forming unexpected, distinctive abstract patterns. The colors I choose for each painting are the result of hundreds of trial studies. These small studies allow me to explore different levels of color concentration and separation affected by the distinctive pigment origins, weights, and by the shapes of individual elements.
The Mylar painting is adhered to a Plexiglas layered panel allowing light to travel past the Mylar surface and bounce back behind the painting, retaining a subtle translucency. For me, the many areas of white space in the painting preserve the experience of looking up through the branches and leaves into the infinite sky above.