Saturday, May 8, 2021, at 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Heather Gaudio Fine Art
66 Elm Street
New Canaan, CT 06840
Jacobs embraces a curiosity with the hand-made and has a deep engagement with the medium of painting. Through a process of rigorous experimentation, she has arrived at a distinctive practice that is decidedly her own.
Stapling linen canvases onto tree trunks, Jacobs rubs them with pigments and oil stick to trace their natural wood grains. She returns to them ritualistically over a period of months or years, registering the inherent patterns and grooves of the barks. Mother Nature also lends a hand to the process, exposing the canvases to light and humidity, their palettes changing as they react to the environment. When the weathered canvases are removed from the barks, they make their way into the artist’s studio. There, Jacobs continues to apply washed-out oil and acrylic paint either on the front of the canvas or from the reverse, pushing the pigments through the weave of the material. The paintings are typically monochromatic, and she restricts her palettes to various tonalities of whites, cool shades of blues, yellows or reds. With minimal means and sparing use of color, the works feel unhurried and offer the viewer a contemplative serenity. They are physical records of time, space, light, place, and environment, and formally, they possess their inherent spatial and light perceptions.
Jacobs lives and works in Western Massachusetts, unencumbered by urban distractions. Her work has been extensively exhibited and written about, and it is found in many notable collections.