Petrichor 2 Painting

Jessie Pollock’s richly-textured landscape paintings and luminous multi-layered images are romantic, sensuous and evocative. They suggest the passage of time and evoke nostalgia for times past. Intensely appealing for their tactile surfaces and radiant light, Pollock’s paintings transcend the reality of a specific time or place. Though modern in their materials and sensibility, these works send us back to a way of life now vanishing. In recent years, Pollock has found inspiration in landscapes important to her, places in New Hampshire where she lives, in Florida where she has spent winters, and in Italy’s countryside, which she has visited. Vanishing Landscapes highlights a recent body of work that focuses on the region surrounding Mount Monadnock, the iconic peak not far from her studio and that has long attracted artists and writers since the nineteenth century and before. Inspired by our changing climate and the mysterious energy in stones, Jessie’s Petrichor series is a new chapter in her homage to rural landscapes that are vanishing every day. Originally a sculptor by training, Pollock incorporates intriguing objects on her painted surfaces: manmade hardware, like old pulleys and wires, as well as bleached bones, bird nests, eggs, shells and rocks. Like excavated artifacts and implements from past civilizations, they draw us deeper into the subject. Wire configurations, such as ladder-like forms, lead ambiguously skyward. Concentric circles emanate from peaks and are intersected by great diagonals; they suggest mystical alignments between ancient natural sites that may have marked pathways through ancient forests. Jessie Pollock’s career had been marked by transitions – first as a sculptor and then as a painter of portraits, still life and landscapes during the last 15 years, and most recently, in this exhibition, the combination of several media in an installation piece. But throughout her career, we find an integrated vision that combines an exploration of themes of memory and remembrance, and a passionate interest in the sensuous possibilities of painting that never fail to engage us. ~ Biography written by Susan Strickler, Former Director of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, USA