Peripheral
eries
agazine
Special Edition
Contemporary Art
Peripheral ARTeries meets
Jennifer D. Printz Lives and works in the United States
There is something about me that makes me wonder about the imperceptible quality of stars in the noonday sun, what forces hold clouds up in the sky, and what arranges the sundry of the universe. This work is about the relationship of these and many other unknown things and a faith in their existence that is strong enough to try to visualize and recreate them. It is about working towards understanding in both a tangible physical way and a subtler spiritual one. Through a progressive buildup of graphite, my hand delicately asserts itself over photographs I have taken of the sky over my Southwestern Virginia home. Drawing is, to me, a loving process of focused attention and deliberate mark making as well as a meditative means of creating that reflects my visceral energies into the finished work through many hours of prolonged touch. The work then contains within it an intersection of humanity and nature, as well as a vast sense of intrinsic history.
An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator peripheral.arteries@europe.com
your evolution as an artist? In particular, how does your cultural substratum direct the trajectory of your current artistic research?
Hello Jennifer and welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to www.jenniferprintz.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training: after having earned your BFA from the East Tennessee State University, you nurtured your education with an MFA that your received from the University of Georgia, Athens: how did those formative years — along with your recent residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts, in Paris — influence
Jennifer D. Printz: I grew up in a small rural town surrounded by the lush beauty of the Southern Appalachian Mountains and in a time period where children spent a lot of time out of doors. My curiosity of the natural world begin there as did my collection of pine cones, dried leaves, and other magical things found while walking across my grandfather’s farm or through a dry creek bed. I also come from a spiritual tradition where songs and books told me the universe was divinely created. I have always sought for signs of that design in the world around me. The bold cyan of a robin’s egg was an indicator of God’s presence to me as much as anything else. Surely these are the seeds of much the of my creative work. My
SPECIAL ISSUE
4