Jean K. Schwartz

For as long as I can remember I have been drawing and painting. I was fortunate to have grown up in Northern New Jersey only 20 minutes from New York City and to have had many opportunities as a child to visit the great art museums of that city. From the very beginning it was the landscape paintings that interested me the most. I especially loved the Impressionists and the Hudson River School. When I went off to college I chose to study art and maintain my proximity to New York. I attended a small liberal arts college, Upsala, that was within a 20 minute bus ride to the City. My focus changed and now I spent most of my time at the Museum of Modern Art. I wanted to emulate the painters of the New York School such as Motherwell, Rothko, Kline and de Kooning. My work became large and abstract and I experimented with mixed media and different surfaces. I spent the summer between my junior and senior college years studying in Paris.

After graduation I returned to Paris to spend a year working, studying and painting, and I had my very first exhibit there in 1969. I returned home to New Jersey and New York and continued working in the same vein throughout the 1970’s with a brief foray into Surrealism. Then in the 1980’s I stopped.

For over a decade I concentrated on home and family but in 1986 I went back to school. I attended George Washington University but rather than art, I studied landscape design. I graduated in 1988 and started my own design business which I concentrated on for the next 10 years. I found myself drawing a lot of landscapes (albeit ones I created) for clients who needed clarification. I began using colored pencils and then pastel and found myself easing into a new way of expressing myself. Those drawings began to be more important to me than the designs they were illustrating and I decided to once again devote myself to art instead of the design business.

For at least four years I worked solely in pastel. It is still a medium I love. We spend a lot of time on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the majority of my pastels are of the scenes that surround me there. I never tire of the vast skies and horizons, the grasses, reflections and amazing colors. I am also inspired by the Potomac and the Piedmont area of our Northern Virginia, not to mention my own backyard. I began to paint in oil again as it is very similar to pastel. There are, however, certain advantages to paint over pastel, notably stability and more techniques and surfaces to explore.

Today I consider my landscapes not literal translations of the specific places that have inspired them, but rather a remembered experience of a place and a time. The light and the atmosphere it creates as it illuminates the landscape is what is important in my paintings. They are less about the actual and more about how this scene and atmosphere makes us feel. These effects of nature are common experiences for all of us and by focusing on them in my paintings I hope to connect with the viewer on and emotional level