Local artist Jenn Rockwell’s work has evolved since she first started painting portraits in oil and acrylic. Her new work is more illustrative and contains more of a narrative. She paints things that she finds either humorous or intriguing, inspiring, or absurd–most recently, Juggalos.
Local artist Jenn Rockwell’s work has evolved since she first started painting portraits in oil and acrylic. Her new work is more illustrative and contains more of a narrative. She paints things that she finds either humorous or intriguing, inspiring, or absurd–most recently, Juggalos.
Rockwell has begun working on a series of Juggalette portraits in which Juggalos are portrayed in her characteristic gauche and marker against a stark, white background. The series began when she found a series of photographs by Nate “Igor” Smith at Driven By Boredom. After asking if she could work from his photos for a series of paintings, Rockwell began doing at least a painting a day of the individuals.
“I knew about the Juggalos and Juggalettes. When I saw them I just wanted to paint them immediately,” says Rockwell.
Her Juggalette portraiture features bold, drawn lines and highly saturated fields of color, with the figures often making direct eye contact with the viewer. Though her work has gone through many phases to get to its current state, these confrontational portraits have always intrigued Rockwell.
“People are incredible. Human beings are pretty awesome and do a lot of wild things, and I like to capture that in painting,” says Rockwell.
Rockwell said she will continue working on the series indefinitely, saying, “They keep having the Gatherings yearly, so there will be more pictures of these people that I keep wanting to paint.”
This series differs from her other work in that it is a specific subject matter that she is working with, unlike her earlier work, in which she painted disparate people she found intriguing.
In previous work, her portraits also usually contained backgrounds. Sometimes they were as simple as a solid color; other times, animals and flowers created the backdrop for her figures. Rockwell says, “For a while I was just thinking that I only wanted the focus to be on the figure. Nothing else was important so the background didn’t really matter.”
Before the Juggalette series, Rockwell often painted from photographs of her friends. She chooses the people she paints based on those who intrigue her and the way they are positioned in photographs. “To set up a composition correctly, I’ll use a person standing in a certain way,” says Rockwell. “It’s very visual, obviously; how they look and what they’re doing makes me choose them.”
Though her work consists mostly of painting, Rockwell also does drawings, which many sometimes feature a psychedelic narrative and are usually made for silk screening. “I feel like painting is more freeing to me, but with drawing I’m definitely trying to make the lines act like paint in a way,” says Rockwell.
The Juggalette series will be featured in a solo show on December 7 in FUSO Gallery at 321 Brook Road. On January 2, Rockwell will be in a group show at Gallery 5 with Tyler Thomas, Eliza Childress, and Sarah Gofitt.
