Jeanette Fintz

Color is my most intuitive source of inspiration, connecting me to nature; it is also, ironically, my most passionately calculated element. In the primal struggle among sometimes apparently random components, subtly modulated color clarifies purpose, builds context, and holds the structure together.

My earliest successes were with landscape painting, using a vibrant palette that continues to inform my work with a natural river of light and energy. Prior to fully embracing geometry, as an expressionist painter, I worked with a self- generated system of ellipses swimming in and out of gestural pours and drips. Rhythm and repetition enlivens these paintings, which play between planning and chance.

What had been initially a loosely gridded underpinning subsequently came to the forefront and expanded (2005-9) into a fascinating matrix that continues to satisfy my search for meaning inherent in syntax and shape. Fueled by light and color, paintings dating from 2009-2015, embrace the link between structure and spirit through pattern and geometry.

My immersion in this material, initially begun after a Sabbatical trip to Spain in 2005, has unified my life and painting with a common purpose and inquiry. The hexagonal grid, upon which many of the paintings are based, has opened up vast possibilities for shape discovery and opportunities for connection.

The group called Andalusian Shards, (2009-2012) shows the influence of the fractured mosaics of Gaudi and infinite expansion of Islamic patterning systems. That dazzling geometry revived my natural inclination towards the rhythmic pulsations and mesmerizing shape connections that had been so satisfying in my earliest work.

The grid manifests, in the diagonally divided Role Play series, as the unifying agent among disparate forms. In these pieces I play with alternatively obscuring and revealing the links, displaying the capacity for transformation: the grid as source of hidden parallels and harmonies.

This same division of surface appears in the larger pieces from 2013 -14
(Syncope, Greenlight, Interpolation Rhythm, and Traveler’sReflection lll). I’m challenged to puzzle together the two sides along the border and create a whole that resolves into and emerges from, the same source.

The Law in These Parts (2014) was completed after a sabbatical trip to Turkey where I became intrigued by another grid that uses the 90-degree angle as well as 30-degree angles. The use of repetition in this piece and in Interpolation Rhythm is an indicative by-product of my dedicated meditation and mantra practice. The Law in These Parts exhibits a strong contrast of increased complexity on the left, to nearly none on the right. I have yet to see where this will take me but presently I understand it as a visual representation of change in awareness from a multitude of thought forms, to a single one.