MY FRIEND, JEN, AT A CLOSE DISTANCE*
5.1.07

I'm continuing my series of featuring those in my life who have been, and continue to be, tremendously supportive in helping me to recover and find myself again.

I am absolutely blown away by the work of my dear and beautiful friend, Jen. She's a New York artist and as you can see from her paintings above, incredibly talented. Like scary brilliant in how she depicts and interprets the world talented, and I'm not just saying that because she's one of my closest friends. Seriously, I could stare at her paintings forever.

Jen and I went to college together, I was her RA, actually, and we became good friends. Then we both ended up in New York together, and we grew even closer. Jen has been there through all my trials and tribulations, the pursuit and celebration of all my degrees, my up and down moods, my wedding, the birth of my son, and the postpartum depression that followed. At my sister's wedding in Venice, while pregnant with my son, I ended up in a 15th century hospital with some strange chest infection that was never diagnosed. I left a hysterical, laughing, crying message with Jen. Then my cell phone died in the middle of my message. She called every hospital in Venice until she found me.

When she had her first solo show in L.A. (also amazing), I went to her opening. It had been only a few months since I had been released from the hospital for my psychotic episode, and so everyone was nervous, including me. I wondered whether Jen would see me differently, her mentally ill, bipolar friend. Nope. We just talked the way we always did. She listened, I listened. She talked to me about her work, the men in her life. I told her how tough marriage and mothering was, and how we had five therapists. We laughed. A lot. We shopped. A lot.

Whenever I'm with Jen, I feel like a single girl again.

Thank you, Jen, for your unconditional love and friendship. I just know you will be famous one day, and I will be so proud to know you.

*Artist’s Statement
Presant draws us into dreamlike interiors which are highly evocative, richly painted and dramatically illuminated. The scale, staging of the figures and multiple layers of reality simulate the cinematic experience. Each interior space becomes a physical manifestation of the character’s psyche. Conscious and unconscious desire, memory and projection unfold pictorially. Through the merging of both real and fictitious elements, the artist also investigates the conflation between our media filled lives, and our lived reality. By depicting the subject through the female perspective, Presant represents the female nude as a figure of empowerment, not the object of the male gaze.

The artist mimics the process of reconstructing memory in the development of the composition for the painting. Objects and figures, part real, part imaginary are combined to feel fragmented and pieced together. Once a composition is finalized, at times, using digital technology, Presant meticulously paints the image in oil, adding a new level of coherence and reinterpretation achieved through the hand-made process. The treatment of light unifies the painted surface and plays an important role in the psychological content of the artist’s work. Light and shadow both reveal and conceal. The human form of both subject and viewer defines how each perceives and experiences reality.

Jen is featured in this month's issue of American Art Collector.
Her work can be found on: http://www.lindawarrengallery.com/artists/presant/index.shtml