“I paint the skies with peace and passion, because that’s the way they paint me.”
Jeni Bate lives in Imperial County California – though she grew up in Wales. In childhood, she enjoyed painting skyscapes, but art gave way to academics. In 2001; she had an epiphany: “Now, you have to paint!” Jeni believes that her role as an artist is to make people think twice about the sky. How it works, how we underappreciate and pollute it, and how it is ultimately, where we live.
She incorporates multiple skills into each painting - including writing poetry for and into them, one way to combine both sides of her creativity. Her signature “refracturing” (cutting/ reassembling) technique, described as somewhere between third generation orphist and unclassifiable, presents the scene in the piecemeal way it would be observed. The term was recognized by the international collage magazine ‘Kolaj’ in 2016.
