Jennifer Chaney

Jennifer Chaney grew up exploring the sensuous marshes and islands on the Mississippi coast – an environment that would become basis of her visual language. A 2003 graduate of University of Montevallo – where she received a Bachelor’s degree in Art, Chaney’s most recent work is born in dreams, painted after her two young children were finally put to bed. Like so many artists who are also mothers, her work is inspired by her children’s delight in discovering the world and their inner freedom, rekindling her own deep connection to landscapes.

Chaney’s landscape portrait series are vignettes of landscapes enclosed in a gestural oval shape. The oval as a symbol represents many things: an oval vignette of antique photos of my relatives, key holes, an egg, snow globes, bubbles, a pebble you could hold in your hand, the view through a telescope. The landscapes are impressions of memories and daydreams from childhood and adulthood, places of escape, of excitement and romance, intrigue and possibility. They are cornerstones and playgrounds of both hope and repose. The landscape portraits idealize experience over other modern, traditional symbols of human value such as physical appearance, job titles, and accomplishments. We are the total of our experiences.