Judy Jensen

Reverse painting on glass

"Worlds separated by time and space collide in Jensen's exquisite illusions.
A native Texan who now lives in Austin, Jensen has reinvented a seldom used technique, reverse painting on glass, to conjure hallucinatory effects."

Judy Jensen, Austin artist, Austin artists, glass, glass artist, glass artists, contemporary glass, Texas glass artists, Texas painters, glass painter, reverse painting on glass, reverse paintings on glass, contemporary art, narrative art, narrative artists, Heller Gallery, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Detroit, Institute of Arts, Habatat Galleries, Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, American Craft, Glass magazine, Penland School of Crafts, Pilchuck Glass School, Pilchuck, Urban Glass, Galveston Arts Center, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Racine Art Museum, Mint Museum, Kohler Art Center, Cleveland Museum of Art, Chicago Navy Pier, Royal Ontario Museum, Corning Museum of Glass, New Glass Review, Austin Bergstrom International Airport, Austin Museum of Art, Austin American Statesman

Solo Exhibitions

Group Exhibitions

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2000

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1988

1986

1985

Public Collections

Honors and Awards

Lectures

Selected Public Speaking

Bibliography

Catalogues

Books

Reviews

Features

Critical Reviews

Worlds separated by time and space collide in Jensen's exquisite illusions. A native Texan who now lives in Austin, Jensen has reinvented an old, but seldom-used technique, reverse painting on glass, to conjure hallucinatory effects.
Nancy Bless, art critic
American Craft

Jensen is a storyteller, weaving complex tales and mixing cultural references. [Her] luminous, sometimes sparkling colors and the abundance of detail command the viewer's attention and her apparently unconnected images demand interpretation. The complexity of her paintings is not intended to defeat viewers, but to challenge them. The key to understanding Jensen's work is "what you see is what you get", as long as you're willing to look beyond the surface.
Karen Chambers, art critic
Judy Jensen: Feverish (catalogue)

Judy Jensen's reverse paintings on glass contain an ever-expanding lexicon of opulent surfaces amid her tableaux. Ever-experimental in her painting technique, Jensen is upping the ante with content. While she continues to draw on the history of art, incorporating references from the Renaissance, Byzantium and classical antiquity, as well as natural history drawings and decorative arts, Jensen is deepening her narrative, and more firmly rooting it in our times. This is a fertile period for the artist, as she expands into new narrative territory.
Madeline Irvine, art critic
Austin American-Statesman

A master of [the] complex process [of reverse painting] is Judy Jensen. Her narrative glass canvases recall motifs from medieval paintings filled with archetypal symbols. Trompe l'oeil images and painterly illustrations play with suggestive ideas from many cultures, as well as her own personal experience.
Lucartha Kohler, writer and artist
Glass: An Artist's Medium

Jensen is essentially a painter who uses glass as her canvas, creating low reliefs of varied shape and with a smooth, hard surface of glass providing an appropriate support for the highly imaginative, dreamlike subjects executed in vivid colors.
Henry L. Hawley, curator, Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland Museum catalogue

With this jewel-like radiance, enigmatic feeling in Jensen's work is heightened. Strangely mysterious scenes consisting [of] religious images, actual social occurrences, and the artist's own recollections take us into the realm of symbolic narrative.
Tomana Makato
Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art catalogue

Jensen has developed a national reputation as an innovative glass artist. To label her as such however, not only ghettoizes her work within the craft medium, but also denies her ability as a painter and storyteller.
Saundra Goldman
Austin American-Statesman

Process

Stings 8.5" x 11"

Influences

Jensen's creations lie somewhere between a collage and a collection, a Wunderkammer of artifacts from her travels and dreams. Painted passages refer to Indian miniatures, Byzantine icons, Renaissance painting, pages from scientific, religious and natural history texts, as well as mementos and memories from her travels in Asia, the Middle East and the Americas. A mixture of seductive beauty, mysterious ritual and danger runs through the works...in which Jensen has tinkered with just the right mixture to ignite meaning and emotion. As she puts it, "The caldera of active volcanoes is where the earth is most alive."
Nancy Bless
American Craft magazine

Astonishing snakes form the entrance to most Buddhist temples in Thailand. The contrast between the Buddhist view of the snake as Buddha's protector and the Judeo-Christian view of the snake as the tempter and defiler was striking. I examined the contrast in the painting Caduceus. On the snake's undulating body I placed images of different positive serpentine aspects: the caduceus, the ancient symbol of healing; the DNA double helix; a natural science illustration of a crane eating a snake; the Buddhist Naga, snake-as-protector; and two snakelike spermatozoa. The snake's tongue and tail are formed by bits of carved wood I found in Thailand.

In the Perigord region of France, an area of prehistoric caves containing some of the earliest known depictions of the human form and fixations, I discovered a late 19th-century medical textbook. The beautiful engravings of the internal and external workings of the human body bore a distinct relationship to the remarkably moving cave paintings. Each expressed a desire for mastery and control of our mortality. For the past few years, I have examined these issues by incorporating representations of these medical illlustrations into my paintings as background narratives.

Images

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Prices available upon request.

Gallery 1

Gallery 2

Gallery 3

Contact

Email judyjensen@austin.rr.com

Copyright © 2007 Judy Jensen

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