In recent years, the world has seemed especially cacophonous to artist Nancy Jenner. In a loud room, says Jenner, “I get quiet.” Her impulse is to travel inward, she says, and focus her gaze on what is small and constant. She walks the Atlantic shoreline often and lingers on the edges of Wellfleet’s ponds and harbor. There she’ll take hundreds of pictures with her iPhone, “trying to get to that moment of intimacy.”
She often returns to a central creative challenge: “I wonder if I could get a painting to feel like those ripples, if I could capture that light the way I experience it?”
Jenner has been spending more and more time in Wellfleet, where she and her partner have had a house since 2019. The works in her current show, “Look Close/Think Far,” at AMZehnder Gallery were all done in the last six months: oil paintings, most only eight by eight inches, and a series of mixed-media works. Nearly every piece is about the sea.
In Sultry, she paints sticky, shiny sand, dotted with pebbles: the water’s underbelly exposed at low tide. The viewer imagines the smell of the silt, the feeling of sinking slowly into the muck. In Sea Light, she captures the gentle rise of a wave poised to crash. Its color is the yellow-green of sea glass, opaque, but so delicate it suggests translucence.
Watching the Waves, a picture of the ocean on a day of gentle weather, is the largest painting in the show at 30 by 24 inches. The whole canvas seems to shift with the water. Near the bottom, white eddies tell the story of a previous wave. In the distance, another wave approaches.
“Every time, every day, every season, every light is different,” says Jenner. At the same time, everything about the water is cyclical, she says. “It’s everlasting.”
Jenner’s mixed-media works are distinct from her paintings in material and subject. She makes the images in an editing app called Procreate by layering hundreds of photographs and then adding filters. The photographs are reproductions of her watercolors and reference images she uses for her paintings. Unlike in her paintings, much of what happens in Procreate is unscripted, she says. Once she’s decided which combinations feel right, she prints them out and uses pastel pencils to draw on top of the images: things like swirling storm clouds and smoke plumes.
It’s a “disruptive landscape” she’s looking for, she says: alien horizons with multiple moons, haze thick enough to obscure the sun, oversaturated imitations of natural sunsets, and outlines of trees that appear like faint skeletons; ominous weather haunts every image.
“I think a lot about issues of climate change,” says Jenner. She keeps a “studio prop” with her when she works: a painting she did of the shoreline, with a set of plastic six-pack rings looming, almost spotlit, in the foreground. That painting is “like bopping someone over the head with the idea of plastic in the ocean,” says Jenner. That’s not what she wanted to do with her mixed-media works. The pieces evoke the same ominous feelings “without being quite so blatant.”
In Untitled 38, Jenner used dark purple pastel for the sky. The bright blue of a photograph shines in the gaps. The whole unsettled dusky firmament meets the ground, which might be water or land. It’s almost impossible to tell.
In Storm Cloud, one large cloud hangs over the landscape. The scene is motionless, and the cloud is beautiful. But it is also, clearly, a full-bellied storm.
“They’re meant to be mysterious,” says Jenner about the works. She hopes they’re “beautiful enough that it might get people to consider what’s going on in the disruption in our weather systems and landscapes.”
Jenner grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea, but she says she never felt fully at home there. “By the time I was in high school, I was ready to get out,” she says. There were two places she did love: the ocean, always nearby, and the pond across the street from her childhood house. Her first drawings were of that pond and of the ocean: “Sea grass and stones and water.” But she took a circuitous path before returning to these subjects as an adult.
Jenner went far away from the ocean to Penn State, where she studied fine art and graduated in 1980. Then she moved to Boston. “I always thought that I’d live someplace else in my life,” she says, “but I’ve come to realize that I’ve stayed here because this is where I’m from. This is me.”
For a time, as a graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Jenner painted “corpses”: nude women posed like Venus, in flesh colors, with bloody stumps for arms and legs. She’d read The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark and decided Clark had gotten it all wrong. Her work, which she says was never for sale, was a visceral, conceptual reaction to the objectifying “male gaze.”
“I was coming of age,” says Jenner. “I was exploring.” But those works aren’t Jenner anymore. Neither are the works she once thought she should aspire to: the sprawling, stratigraphic paintings of Mark Bradford or the little abstract paintings in thick paint done by a friend. “There was this idea that contemporary art was about depicting some inner truth,” she says.
In the watery light coming through the windows of the AMZehnder Gallery, Jenner shakes her head. “That’s not who I am,” she says. “These seascapes” — she gestures to the works waiting to be arranged on the walls — “feel most like who I am as an artist.”
Jenner’s paintings are beautiful, but for her, beauty isn’t necessarily the end goal. “Beauty is a funny word,” says Jenner, “but I don’t want to be afraid to use it.” The concept of beauty “gives us a renewed sense of belief in ourselves as humans,” she says. “The fact that we even perceive beauty is a very human thing — whether it’s the face of your child or a sunset.”
Beauty is also a way into other ideas, she says, like renewal and hope. “If capturing a perfect moment in nature creates an uplifting experience for the viewer,” says Jenner, “I have perhaps perpetuated hope. It’s an audacious goal, but that’s the idea.”
In the Eye of the Beholder
The event: Nancy Jenner’s “Look Close/Think Far”
The time: Through April 23; opening reception Saturday, April 5, 4 to 6 p.m.; artist talk Saturday, April 12, 3 p.m.
The place: AMZehnder Gallery, 25 Bank St. #3, Wellfleet
The cost: Free
