ARTIST JEANETTE PASIN SLOAN: THE REFLECTVE SOUL
Internationally known artist Jeanette Pasin Sloan became a familiar Milwaukee name in the time after Peltz Gallery first featured her artwork 22 years ago. While she currently calls Sante Fe home, she grew up in Illinois, a child of Italian immigrants, who visited a town near Venice every summer to reconnect with their roots. Influenced by her upbringing surrounded by Renaissance art and her parents\' very modern designed houses, here and abroad, Sloan developed an affection for objects. She describes this as “the power of simple objects.”
After graduating from the University of Chicago, she married and was raising two small children, when she began to draw. She drew in any spare time she could find. Here in her kitchen she finally imagined drawing a toaster with it\'s unique reflections and from that point on never stopped or looked back. While her own images become increasingly more abstract, merging the background and object that contain these reflections, Sloan attempts to combine “a sense of order with chaotic disorder” in her paintings and prints. Speaking at the Peltz Gallery opening for her exhibition with her friend Cissy Peltz, Sloan offered some insight into her fascination with reflections.
Why do you paint reflections in your ordinary household objects?
Reflections are mirrors of our lives, [and I\'m]working within my domestic environment and many [I paint] were actually wedding gifts. They\'re simple and have very good reflective qualities. When you think about it, babies recognize themselves in the mirror. It\'s one of the first events in their lives. You wouldn\'t even know who you are without mirrors, our reflections. Reflections teach us who we are and what we live with and around. What we see is there, but we cant\' always understand what that will be.
How has moving to Santa Fe influenced this aesthetic?
It\'s very sunny there compared to Chicago where I grew up. I\'m influenced by the colors, fabrics and rugs, they\'re very bright. It brings out a side of me that\'s influenced by American consumerism, which I\'ve worked in before. Designing wine labels and other things. I call it Heroic Materialism. Where I paint Coke, Disney, Playboy and the Radio Flyer Wagon, with their reflections. In our culture of capitalism and materialism we put a lot of our creative energy into our consumer products.
Those are interesting thoughts. Can you explain that more completely?
My father started, invented, patented the Radio Flyer Wagon. He even formulated the color red for it, which he also has a patent on. A consumer product that Christo [a contemporary artist] worked with in a wrap. Harley Davidson is another iconic symbol, almost of the sexual revolution, as is the Apple icon. Which has been life changing for the culture. Consumer products have an impact on our visual sense.
And you incorporate that into your artwork?
Yes, I\'ve painted the Radio Flyer Wagon with reflections, stacked them. Along with melding the Renaissance and contemporary influences, abstraction and realism [in my work]. Right now I\'m beginning to work in black and white drawings, another medium but with the same objects. It\'s about the beauty of that single object [the Radio Flyer Wagon Sloan grew up with] or a single object that impacts me.
(View Jeanette Pasin Sloan\'s prints and paintings at Peltz Gallery located in downtown Milwaukee on Knapp Street. Or visit www.jeanettesloan.com)
