Jen Sager - Original Artwork
I studied anthropology at the University of Virginia because I could not believe I was allowed to. It was everything I enjoyed thinking about and digging into. I have always wanted to get all the way inside things: cultures, conversations, the underlying structure of how people make meaning together. Not to observe from a distance. To understand from within. I went to Tanzania and it blew my mind wide open - the sky, the golden light on the elephants, the giraffes moving through landscape like they owned time, the tinga tinga paintings in every market. The gorgeous kangas donned by the women. I didn’t know I was an artist then. But I couldn’t stop looking at everything. That feeling never left.
I make work the way I have always moved through the world: inside on the outside. I don’t carry a big guard around who I truly am, and people tend to feel that quickly. My paintings operate the same way. The rawness isn’t a technique. The vulnerability isn’t a pose. I studied under scholars who understood that culture is not something you inherit, it is something you invent, continuously, through every act of making. Painting taught me the same thing. We are symbolic animals. Meaning-making is not what we do on special occasions. It is what we are.
The natural world moves me constantly: beetles, trees, whales, dogs, the curvature of the Earth when you’re far enough out on the water to see it. Chemistry and physics remind me I am self-aware stardust, and I find that more beautiful than diminishing. We get one life in this universe. That fact animates everything I make.
Some work comes through me: the moon paintings, certain charcoals, an entire series of oils that poured out during one week when the world felt bleak and I needed disco. I move across oil, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and digital drawing, and there are paintings I make with my hands instead of a brush — the same refusal to observe from a distance that sent me to Tanzania in the first place. Some arrives more slowly: a structural idea, a color relationship, a question about who belongs next to whom. I don’t paint toward a result. I paint to get somewhere I couldn’t have planned. The humor, the grief, the strangeness. It all goes in. I don’t edit for palatability.
What I want is simple: a still moment, however brief. Just you and the piece. That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it.
Silver Spring, Maryland | jensager.com | @jensagerart
I make work the way I have always moved through the world: inside on the outside. I don’t carry a big guard around who I truly am, and people tend to feel that quickly. My paintings operate the same way. The rawness isn’t a technique. The vulnerability isn’t a pose. I studied under scholars who understood that culture is not something you inherit, it is something you invent, continuously, through every act of making. Painting taught me the same thing. We are symbolic animals. Meaning-making is not what we do on special occasions. It is what we are.
The natural world moves me constantly: beetles, trees, whales, dogs, the curvature of the Earth when you’re far enough out on the water to see it. Chemistry and physics remind me I am self-aware stardust, and I find that more beautiful than diminishing. We get one life in this universe. That fact animates everything I make.
Some work comes through me: the moon paintings, certain charcoals, an entire series of oils that poured out during one week when the world felt bleak and I needed disco. I move across oil, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and digital drawing, and there are paintings I make with my hands instead of a brush — the same refusal to observe from a distance that sent me to Tanzania in the first place. Some arrives more slowly: a structural idea, a color relationship, a question about who belongs next to whom. I don’t paint toward a result. I paint to get somewhere I couldn’t have planned. The humor, the grief, the strangeness. It all goes in. I don’t edit for palatability.
What I want is simple: a still moment, however brief. Just you and the piece. That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it.
Silver Spring, Maryland | jensager.com | @jensagerart
