Presence by Jeanne Toal
Elemental
art from sculptor Jan Hoy and painter Jeanne Toal
October 3 - November 18, 2024
Open 12 Noon to 5 PM • Thursdays through Mondays
Jeanette Best Gallery
701 Water Street, Port Townsend, Washington
Artist's Talk with Jeanne Toal: 6 PM Thursday, October 17 in the gallery
About the artists
JAN HOY hand-builds every piece, shaping something beyond words. All of her works are abstract — and she revels in the freedom from reference or association. Sculpture, she writes, lets her explore form without the inhibitions of traditional ideas, shapes and expectations. All of her original work is done in water-based clay; using this material gives her the latitude to add and subtract until the form is as perfect as possible.
“Curiosity drives my work,” Jan adds. Each piece becomes a three-dimensional answer to a “What if?” question. “Several of my forms have taken two or three years of mulling, envisioning, and sketching to find the answer,” she writes.
When Jan entered college, she thought she had to study something “practical.” What she really wanted to do was make art. Despite all of the “you can’t …” she heard, Jan went forward. She went to the University of Washington, earned her fine arts degree and has lived her passion ever since. She lives and works in Coupeville, on Whidbey Island.
Jan’s sculptures do not come with a “message,” at least not one that can be expressed verbally. “I want people to take it in, to feel the piece,” she says. Its meaning for her? “Pure joy.”
Jan Hoy sculptures — from tabletop-size to monumental — can be felt in public and private spaces across the Northwest. Her work is featured in the Sutter Hill Cathedral Hospital in San Francisco; at Youngstown Flats in Seattle; in Lake Oswego, Oregon; La Conner, Washington; the Veterans Home in Walla Walla, and on Winslow Way, Bainbridge Island’s main street. Jan’s sculptures are also in the collections of the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, the Price Sculpture Forest in Coupeville, and at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.
JEANNE TOAL is curious about the possibilities of transformation. This curiosity propelled her — through an early career in painting, a deep dive into medical writing, a decade of working with people with mental and physical illnesses and without homes, and another as a body therapist inhospitals and hospices. Then came five years in a refugee resettlement program. Now, again, Jeanne is painting full time.
In the studio, she works on several paintings at once. Over time, she says, they influence one another. A piece begins with a single color, while each supporting color either moves the work forward or demands a new direction. Her mediums of choice are oil pigment sticks and metal leaf, often laid over, or under, contrasting fields of color. Because she proceeds from the inside out, Jeanne’s work has an unfinished quality, with distinct traces of accumulated decisions. The result is a multi-layered surface left unframed, allowing space for the viewer to imagine what is beyond the painting.
For the past six years since moving to Port Townsend, Jeanne has used painting to explore — in an intuitive, almost magical way — the mystery of how energy becomes one thing and then another. Raised in the desert in Reno, Nevada, Jeanne returns again and again to the horizon, and what might lie beyond it. Abstractions of sea and sky, land and water suggest possibilities that hover in the distance, as well as the peace that lies at our feet. Recent work explores the relationship between light and dark, the luminosity locked in matter, the light beneath and above the earth.
With Elemental, “I seek to understand the world as a deeper place than it appears to be,” Jeanne writes. “Abstracted, emotional landscapes look at elemental patterns of nature and the complex relationship between light, land, water and sky. Dark horizons, veiled skies and drifting mountains all bear scars, imperfections and injuries that suggest not only loss, but also endurance. The paradox of peril and wonder. The yes/and of experience.
“And, maybe, even the wise words of poet Lucille Clifton, ‘The light insists on itself in the world.’”