Jessie Pollock

Description

Umbrian Landscape II

10 x 10

Cold Wax

Jessie Pollock’s richly textured landscape paintings and luminous photo-based images are romantic, sensuous and evocative. They suggest the passage of time and evoke nostalgia for times past. Intensely appealing for their tactile surfaces and radiant light, Pollock’s paintings transcend the reality of a specific time or place. Though modern in their materials and sensibility, these works send us back to a way of life now vanishing.

In recent years, Pollock has found inspiration in landscapes important to her, places in New Hampshire where she lives, in Florida where she has spent winters, and in Italy’s countryside, which she has visited. Vanishing Landscapes highlights a recent body of work that focuses on the region surrounding Mount Monadnock, the iconic peak not far from her studio and that has long attracted artists and writers since the nineteenth century and before.

Originally a sculptor by training, Pollock incorporates intriguing objects on her painted surfaces: manmade hardware, like old pulleys and wires, as well as bleached bones, bird nests, eggs, shells, and rocks. Like excavated artifacts and implements from past civilizations, they draw us deeper into the subject. Wire configurations, such as ladder-like forms, lead ambiguously skyward. Concentric circles emanate from peaks and are intersected by great diagonals; they suggest mystical alignments between ancient natural sites that may have marked pathways through ancient forests.

Excerpted from Biography written by Susan Strickler, Director of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH.