Friday, March 16, 2012

Visual artists are interested in seeing and interested in seeing everything. Painter Yvonne Jacquette is especially interested in seeing space.

Her painting of a kitchen stove and a child's chair next to it is also a painting of the space be tween them and around them, because she wants it to be so.

She painted the view looking at a view out of the upper part of a window in a house--painting the space up to the ceiling and the space of the sky beyond the glass.

Taking a plane to California, she had watercolors with her to paint when she got there. She realized she could paint the clouds outside the plane window.

She got into painting clouds and their spaces as seen and felt from airplanes.

She'd fly to a city where she wanted to see an museum and stay overnight--having each part of the round trip be at around the same time of day and seeing and sketching the clouds.

One time she got on the plane, and the plane went up and there were no clouds. And no clouds and no clouds. Disappointment at first. Then she realized she could paint the landscape.

It seemed too big at first, but she went at it. Views from above became a big part of her work--views from commercial planes, from small planes she hired, from high places in cities.

Her stuff is beautiful, healthy for the Earthling's heart. You are here, and that's good.

--information from "Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonn Jacquette" by Hilarie Faberman, from the show put together by the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University