Home Studio | Jane Fine
Over the past months of lockdown, Jane Fine has been hunkered
down in her Brooklyn home and studio, working on a series of paintings
begun before the shut down started.
Scroll to the bottom to watch an Instagram conversation between Jane Fine and Ethan Herschenfeld
Right:
“Cover Up”
2020
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 30 inches
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Right:
“Heat Stroke”
2019
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 30 inches
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Right:
“Good In the Woods”
2019
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 30 inches
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Left:
“Poison Pink”
2020
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 32 inches
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Left:
“Dear Free Thinkers”
2019
Acrylic on canvas
32 x 40 inches
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Left:
“Avengers”
2020
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 30 inches
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Left:
“Corrections”
2019
Acrylic on canvas
16 x 20 inches
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As a child in the 1960s I was nourished on a diet of deceptively cheerful Saturday morning cartoons. When I was a young artist in search of a way to animate abstract painting, I found inspiration in this source material and made paintings full of playful physical energy. In the decades since I have thought of my work as deceptively celebratory. Lurking beneath joyful exuberance there is a sense that all is not quite right. The implied dangers range from the chaos of my childhood home, to the incompetence of the current administration and the terror of climate change. Just like the cartoons of my childhood, there’s a fight raging between optimism and anxiety—a duality that couldn’t be more relevant lately. During the months that New York City was transformed by the pandemic (a crisis within the crisis of the Trump presidency) I worked in my Brooklyn studio on two very different projects. Needing an outlet for my fear and my rage, I filled dozens of black and white pages with words such as Help, No, Fuck, and Love, all lightly camouflaged in a stew of abstract language, question marks and dollar signs. These drawings became plaintive cries for help and for peace. On the other hand, a group of joyful pink paintings, all begun before Covid, demanded that I remain optimistic. The largest of these, Mama’s Last Words, is included in the exhibition Never Done at The Tang Museum, celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. The painting was inspired by my mother’s actual last words, “Find the joy inside yourself and express it”—words that have been guiding me through these difficult months.
—Jane Fine
Watch an Instagram conversation between Jane Fine and Ethan Herschenfeld below