Art Reception

I am the walker. If you live in Westhampton you have seen me.  I have walked miles and miles in our town, for 43 years and in all seasons.  My name is Rachel Jenkins.  After working for forty years as a psychologist I took up painting.  My art exhibit with paintings, some poems and a video montage will be at the Westhampton Library for July and August 2023.

Painting has come to me, like writing poetry has

through the need to translate what I feel or see into another form

To be able to have at it from another vantage

To let it speak for itself in its own language

Both painting and poetry are linked to and of my heritage

Poems have always been prompted by metaphor 

Paintings take a different route

Images call for representation
I crave color, brushes, palette knives, canvases,
tubes of paint, dirty rags, water and the mixing of the paints 

the luxury of my studio on the third floor

Poems have arrived whole 

Paintings never do

They demand hours and hours, days and days of sketching 

outlining, with chalk, pencil or paint

Then applying paint, time away
Then returning to see it as if I am seeing it for the first time

The paintings come from a drive to capture
someone’s face, someone’s story, a gesture, a mood
a turn of a head, the light splaying itself onto
their forehead, half of the left cheek, the tip of the left nostril
and lip, the chin, part of the neck, a slice of the clothing, and 

then a wrinkle of the shirt or dress

Color, the mixing of them
Then the refinement
The nuance and the boldness of it all

Filling in the face, capturing features, their distance from
each other, from the forehead, their breadth, wrinkles, dimples indentations, tone and its variations
and the background, realistic or abstract

For 40 years I sat across from people, in a room,
I sat with their stories, their laments, their histories, their faces and their feelings

Now I stand across from people who perch on the easel

 I have a different kind of conversation with them
Still I am full of curiosity, a certain kind of listening, hearing the story, asking a question, nodding, reflecting

Now the dialogue is with paint
It has its own voice and particularity

In the light of day