Jennifer Cronin

Artist Statement

There is always something that cannot be seen.  A before and after.  Something just outside, on the fringe, or even teeming just beneath the surface.  Building upon the ubiquitous but often concealed psychological underpinnings inherent to suburban life, my paintings create an absurd mythology of the seemingly banal.  

I am certainly not alone in my upbringing as a female growing up in the suburbs, yet that aspect of my identity has remained one of the most salient and inescapable to me throughout my life.  My earlier paintings vibrate with a dark anxiety with women looking for ways out, attempting to break through an invisible something as we passively watch their struggle.  Like a painting, they are trapped within their own beauty, grace, and seduction.  

Recently, I have been interested in the fact that my paintings are very unabashedly highly constructed images, just as our reality is construct, perhaps no more real or meaningful than the flat surfaces of the paintings themselves.  Sitting on the surface of the canvas, the paint, sometimes thick, drippy, misty, brush strokey, etc. infuses the banal, quiet, domestic space with beauty, horror, drama, tension, and mystique.  The paintings themselves grapple with the fact that they are merely paintings.  The characters within the paintings confront their existence as merely painted figures.  Painted figures struggling to make sense of their existence within seemingly meaningless structures and confines that they are brought into.  Painted figures trying to find their way within the backdrop of a painting that is just as incidental and banal as life itself.  Painted figures that find ways to cope within their world.  Some, like myself, even turn to painting.