Jennie Summerall is a Charleston native who lives part time in Maine.  She has been painting portraits and other figurative work for thirty six years. She has shown in South Carolina, Massachusetts and Maine.  Her paintings hang in a number of private and institutional collections including her portrait of biologist E. O. Wilson at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery of Art and of Seamus Heaney at Harvard University.

Summerall works in both oil paint and paper collage.

ARTIST STATEMENT
I’ve been creating collage images of animals for years now, with the goal of trying to capture what one viewer called the “sweetness and dignity” of the marvelous creatures who share the planet with us.  My subjects here include the Octopus, an astonishing animal whose abilities are only now beginning to be understood.  (If you haven’t seen My Octopus Teacher it’s well worth it.)  And the Bowerbirds of the Pacific, whose mating activites involve the artful construction of  “bowers” and collections of intriguing objects.   As the years have passed I’ve struggled to absorb the profoundly sad truth that mankind is destroying the world as we - and the animals - have known it.

Some of the pieces in this show are from a new series called “Où sont les neiges?”  This phrase is drawn from a very old poem which asks “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”   I’ve depicted versions of arctic animals which turn white in wintertime for camouflage, now confounded by a warming climate which fails to produce the snow and ice on which they depend.  Meanwhile the billionaires are busy playing with their rockets.

My hope is that in spite of my bitter and helpless feelings about all of this I’ve managed to convey some sense of beauty and appreciation for the natural world.  And I’m grateful for the human ingenuity shown in the array of handmade papers I’ve collected over the years.  The red paper for the Octopus, for instance, is spotted with a wax resist method.  The deep blue of the Satin Bowerbird is a hand-burnished paper I found in London.  Hunting for these papers has been a fun and ongoing part of my creative process.

As E.O. Wilson said, we are “biophiles,” lovers of life and living things.  He says of this propensity: “our spirits are woven from it, and hope rises on its currents.”