In the Studio with Jeanette Fintz
July 2nd, 2025
Painter Jeanette Fintz virtually sat down with us to discuss her career, creative process, and what inspires her artistic practice. Her geometric abstract paintings are mesmerizing explorations of the balance between color, shape, and pattern.
Beginning her career as a landscape painter, Fintz’s practice developed to include increasingly vibrant color pallets and a gradual embrace of geometry as she explored the play between planning and chance. Inspired by her exposure to Islamic art in Turkey and the Gaudi mosaics in Spain, she cultivated a fascination with geometric elements such as rigid shapes or general grid-like frameworks which have become increasingly prevalent throughout her work. Such geometric elements insinuate an organization to her compositions which naturally guides the eye through the piece on a journey to grasp the suggested logic. However, Fintz playfully disrupts these implied structures with energetic colors and irregular shapes and textures to give the impression of a natural inclination towards disorder, akin to flowers growing through cracks in the pavement.
CBCA: What’s your background? Did you always want to be an artist?
JF: I’m a Brooklyn born abstract painter, art educator and sometime curator and art writer who resides in Hudson NY. My artist husband and I migrated to the Hudson Valley region in the late 1980’s from the artist enclaves of Tribeca and Williamsburg NY.
My father always said I was born with a pencil in my hand. I was always drawing and making up stories with lots of characters, often large families. The drawings were part of the story. I also read a lot and what I read influenced what I drew or painted. As a non-objective artist the subject of narrative doesn’t come up much. But my work is about relationship. I feel the edges of shapes and spaces as being in a dynamic relationship with one another. That becomes the drama now. I was the class artist, so yes, I always knew I would do something in art. But becoming a painter was a leap of faith. I think that my college professors were wonderful role models exemplifying a way of life that one could emulate that balanced the risk with something like a steady income, if one could get teaching positions. That was in the mid 70’s so lots has changed.
My background is NY School Post Cubist-Expressionist. I was trained figuratively with intense focus on analytical dissection of forms into directional marks that divvied up the picture plane into palpable potent positive and negative shapes. My first painting loves were Monet, Matisse, Cezanne, Vuillard and Bonnard; later, De Kooning, Diebenkorn and Mondrian, and when I was painting plein air in Maine, Fairfield Porter. The next pivotal influence is that of Islamic geometry and working with symmetrical grid systems.
CBCA: How do you begin a work?
JF: I work subjectively with geometry based on symmetrical grid systems. My sense of light and color comes from sensitivity to my natural surroundings and early experiences painting directly from the landscape. When I began painting non-objectively in my early 30’s, my shapes evolved from the subdivision of the circle and intuitive extrusions of those shapes. There is a lot of rhythm and repetition in both the older and the current work. The early paintings were based on the body, and I chose the circle and the triangle because they were symbols of the female. Though they are Platonic forms for me they held subjective origins.
CBCA: How has your work progressed?
JF: My work now is quite architectural and diagrammatic. It’s about admitting instability into a pattern, evoking time and transience through selective destruction. That selectivity sometimes comes from the paint handling itself, using veiling washes and more stable opaque zones in contrast, but fundamentally, it comes from decisively editing – out particular edges. The work over the past 2-3 years has brought nature and memory into back into the mix. The paint handling collides physically with the precise grid edges; veiling washes expand deeply into atmosphere.
CBCA: What informs your work? What are you trying to communicate in your art?
JF: Some of the artists that I looked to for inspiration, bridging the gap between perceptual experience and the architecture of the plane are Maria Helena Viera da Silva, Al Held and Brice Marden. Pattern painters like Valerie Jaudon give nourishment but ultimately, I like to claim more freedom to use paint in a variety of expressive ways to create an open sensation of space. My initial intensely chunky geometric work was influenced by tile patterns from Islamic sources, and the rhythmic patterns were meditative. The repetition was theoretically soothing, unifying with the One. Divine Unity. The patterning approach coincided with my beginning a meditation practice, and both activities fed into one another. But for my nature, the actual painting process eventually felt confining, and I began to break open the grids edge to edge continuity for the sake of possible transformation and discovery. What I’m communicating is the ephemeral qualities of time and space transmitted through the sensation of movement, ellipsis and transformation.
CBCA: What are your most intriguing experiences as an artist?
My most powerful experiences as an artist were painting landscape while living as a recluse in Maine for several summers, no phone or television! Visiting the Alhambra, in Granada, and seeing Cordoba and Seville where the mesmerizing tile patterns and architecture captivated me. And my meditation practice which began in 2006. I started meditation when I was diving into the Adobe Suite while teaching at Parsons. To manage stress! Therefore, I can also list learning digital programs among my important experiences. Living and working in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and starting an affiliate school for Parsons was also an intriguing art and life experience. The textiles particularly influenced subsequent bodies of work. And the music and the temples in Thailand and Bali!
What I treasure most is discovering something new even though the raw material, the grids I’m working from, may be a given. Transformation, resulting from the journey, in the work and in my life as an artist, is most challenging and satisfying. Conveying a feeling of movement through space and playing the edge between creation and destruction is my sweet spot.
If I weren’t a visual artist, I think I would have been a dancer or an architect. A designer of spaces or patterns. I’m drawn to psychology and anthropology as well. I’ve been thinking about writing a memoir but haven’t wanted to sit down at the computer for that long!
CBCA: How has your practice changed overtime? Is there a reason you use different mediums for different pieces?
JF: My process is very different from when I began painting non-objectively. I began abstract paintings with no drawing per se. I would do painted or graphite studies for larger compositions in specific bodies of work. But I worked very directly with the paint and let it evolve. I now start a painting with a developed linear drawing stemming from the overlapping of two grid systems, usually worked out on 2 or more sheets of translucent vellum. I change the feeling of the space by rotating the grid on the support and then selecting what connections to take out or emphasize. The painting changes and shows me how I might see connections differently, inviting an unexpected “something” to emerge. Over the past 4 years or so I have allowed more spontaneity in the process. Initially I worked out all the kinks in the drawing phase. Currently I experience more revisions on the canvas. I have brought back the pour or gestural ground from my repertoire, as a foil for the linear drawing to riff off. I use Adobe Illustrator as a study assist, testing out line and color modifications along the way.
I work primarily in acrylic on canvas or linen. I have worked smaller scale on wood panels with mediums that approximated the feeling of enamels. These were influenced by my interest in tile patterns. The use of linen or burlap with their tactility and earthly neutral color came about when I inversed the spatial progression from concealed complexity in the back plane moving to very opaque monochromatic front plane, to a revealing build-up of transparent layers which allowed you to see the junctions and the original color of the support. My use of transparency is what made me switch from oil to fluid acrylics. Groups of recent paintings, the Provisional group, feature collaged together sections of linen and canvas, repurposed remnants of abandoned paintings, often unstretched, hung with grommets. Presenting the work this way reflects the instability of my own life during the past 5 years and resonates with the chaos worldwide. It also interrupts continuous viewing, and promotes a contradiction between the defined, projected illusions of plane and the actual diagrammatic flat object that is the painting.
CBCA: How do you define success?
JF: The most rewarding part of following the artist’s path is creating a life which allows one to hold on to awareness of an inner motif that one chooses to cherish and maintain. I would say inner child, except that it’s a cliche. It’s a life that simultaneously values freedom and discipline, made possible by an adequate income.
Some part of one never grows up the way other folks do when they have a job that’s not fed by that connection to a type of innocence that one guards preciously. In times of turmoil, one turns to it as a ballast. It’s a way of making sense of the world by creating your world, however full of contradictions it is. In the best of all possible situations working in a creative field allows you to set your own parameters and use your imagination and not compromise, at least in your work. The world of work is full of compromises – the actual art making should be a place where it’s not. One certainly doesn’t go into a field like fine art or painting, in my case, because you view it as a path to getting rich! One wants approbation but wants it for being seen in a manner that it’s not possible to be seen in ordinary daily life. So, to summarize I would say that the most rewarding part of being a creative is the freedom to set up on high what you most value and strive to keep it there. This doesn’t happen in isolation. So much depends on circumstances and establishing a support system that allows one to continue to do what one feels most free doing. Freedom is success.
Jeanette Fintz
Jeanette Fintz
Jeanette Fintz
Jeanette Fintz
Jeanette Fintz
Jeanette Fintz
