Jay Jensen

Artistic approach

Jay Jensen, of American origin, obtained a bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College in 1972 and, in 1980, a Master's degree in Fine Arts from Colorado State University. 

A common characteristic in all his canvases is the artist's fascination for brilliant colour and light. One might think that this fascination is common to all painters, and the artist agrees, hesitating himself to attribute a so-called "deeper" meaning to his paintings and preferring to leave to the observer the task of making his Interpretation. When asked what he tries to express in his work, the artist evokes the American painter of the 20th century Edward Hopper who once said: "What I wanted to do was paint the light of the sun on the wall of a house ".

Artist's page at Galerie Vanasse

The artist's paintings are figurative, but he believes that, in the final analysis, figurative and abstract terms are nonsense. All the paintings are the representation of an observation and are, by the same token, figurative. Conversely, simply because they are delimited by a framework, paintings are inevitably abstractions. The artist appreciates the tension between the figurative and the abstract, especially in his way of applying colour. The tall grasses and clouds dissolve in jets of paint, water, in layers of transparent colours. What by a distance may seem representative has, up close, the quality of an action painting. The artist is captivated by the brightness of the colour and the light itself, but also by the texture of the canvas and by the energy that emerges from the stroke of the brush. Originally from Westchester County, New York, the artist resides in St-Lambert. He works full time in advertising and teaches painting, drawing and engraving on a part-time basis.

Languages

Courses are given in French and English.