Do what you love. Love what you do.

Jenna Bauer is probably most well known because of SCOSAG: the South City Open Studio and Gallery in her native St. Louis, founded by none other than the painter herself in 2002. A non-profit art school and camp for children, it is based on the belief that children  should work closely with professional artists. If that’s not impressive enough, then take this into consideration: She founded SCOSAG fresh out of college at the age of 25. Shortly after giving up her role as executive director of the program, she moved to New York State, which is where I met her. She agreed to allow me to interview her, and it was quite the learning experience.  Her studio is covered with her bright, vibrant work, mirroring much of her personality, and she told me about each piece throughout the tour and patiently explained her process and how she identifies as a painter. You can check out her website here, and look at her paintings, silkscreens, drawings and prints that are both colorful and meaningful, a wonderful introduction into the world of art for those just beginning to enter. She and her paintings have helped me understand the concept of “real art,” and for that I will always be grateful.

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leigh: “So Jenna Bauer…tell me about yourself.”

Jenna Bauer: “Well, I’m an educator, and an artist, and I believe in the golden rule, and I’m just finding my way through this world just like everybody else is! But I try to do it in a way that brings joy to people instead of pain and so yeah, my goal in educating, as an educator, is to -kind of on the sidelines of that, on the sidelines of teaching how to make a pinch-pot or how to mix colors also to find the good things about people. Even if it’s someone you’re indifferent towards, or someone you don’t like, try to find what’s good about them and what they have to offer the world in a positive way, and try to absorb that. Otherwise you’re wasting your time complaining about somebody. I mean, that’s kind of like one of my mantras is to make feel good about- is to help people feel good about themselves and people even if it’s not, like, right up front.

Leigh: “Tell me about your work.”

Jenna: “The work is, generally speaking, based on the horizon line and everything that falls in front of it or behind it…the sky, the ground, light, shapes…but as I said I’m not a landscape painter, and I enjoy formal work just like color and composition. Basing my work off of what’s been done before but also trying to reinvent, or recreate, not reinvent…add new ideas to the grand spectrum of art-making. You can look up Joseph Albers and see where I got my inspiration from- my parents had a fake reproduction of a Joseph Albers painting in my home where I grew up –and I still have it, it’s huge– it’s ‘Homage to Blue- Homage to the Square’ it’s a blue one, and I have a feeling I was inspired by that…piece being in my house, because I like squares and color.”

“I also make work that is a reflection of the arc of my arm, all the gestural work, kind of, in some of my earlier drawings would just be that mark and that’s what you see in those paintings. So it’s almost like some of those landscapes where you saw when I titled them ‘Everything Becomes One’ It was kind of like combining the natural elements that exist with this gesture of moving my arm and kind of combining the figure with the landscape and the result was this concept of everything around us joining together. And everything is made out of carbon…so much what’s around us is carbon, you know,” [Knocks on table] “our bodies, this table, like, I think, -I’m not for sure, I’m not a chemist or scientist- but…because of that, when you think the common element being in all these things that’s also what gave some validity to the idea of everything becoming one because everything already is.”

leigh: “Do you have your favorite piece of artwork that you’ve done and favorite piece of art that somebody else has done?”

Jenna: “Uh, probably favorite piece of artwork that I’ve done are those two lines on a piece of graph paper. That like sums it up for me. Simplicity, but it’s also like if you read into it it’s like plate tectonics. It’s the crust of the world coming together to make mountains with two lines. You know and there’s like all these implications. And by somebody else I mentioned too, that Stuart Davis painting, which I, I mean, it’s hard to say; various works of Joseph Albers, Richard Sara. But you know, I think you could say something like my favorite piece of work is…I haven’t seen it yet. It’s tough to be floored by artwork these days- I see a lot of work. I like when it changes my life, you know? That doesn’t happen every day.”

leigh: “How do you choose the colors you work with?”

Jenna: “Well I never use the ink or the paint straight from the tube, I always mix every color,” [she points out a zinc press plate] “Actually that’s a zinc plate that I need to clean off so I can print it –use it to print with, actually, it’s a good size- That’s like your fingerprints everyone- every person makes colors on an individual basis like if you go to art school or if are familiar with art school, different kids have different color sensibilities, different artists have different color sensibilities. You can just see in a grouping of colors, like ‘Oh that reminds me of Philip Gustan’ and or, ‘Oh that reminds me of Helen Frankenthaller’ so my color pallets are kind of predictable, it’s just kind of muted primary colors. I don’t know, everyone’s got a different color sense, I just, it’s hard to articulate how you choose to add just a dollop of black to yellow just to make it a little bit dingier like that shade of yellow up in that painting up there,” [she points to a painting on her wall] “you know, that’s not yellow straight from the tube, and there’s two shades of yellow right next to each other that are slightly different. And in that painting there, there’s like, three or four shades of green to khaki to brown, and that’s kind of what makes that painting some, I mean it’s not the strongest painting in the world, just a slight variation that you can create in color,” [in reference to glazing ceramics] “I mean, if you’re glazing something, you could put a few drops of one color into the color you’ve already used just to make it slightly different whether it’s just a gradation or a separate section or the mug is yellow and the handle is just a slightly brighter shade of yellow or slightly darker shade of yellow. Those little subtleties in color are what create magnetism in work and make you want to look at it more when there’s things to notice like, ‘those aren’t the same shades of green.’ I mean, it’s all silly and such silly things to sometimes [notice] that I guess you could make the argument sometimes that it’s silly to spend time worrying about that, but what’s there to life if you can’t enjoy the aesthetics and the beauty and the color and the richness of the things to look at, you know? So I try to make them fun and interesting to look at and that’s why I make art. Just ‘cause everything’s so hectic, like, the wind’s blowing outside but when you stare at a piece of art it just kind of lets you rest. And that’s why I don’t make art that would have like, Richard Nixon’s face in it, I’m not into that. You can turn on the television and see that, so I try to keep that in mind too.

leigh: “You said something about a man who saw one of your prints and said that it was great and you said he was talking about just black and green boxes. How does your art differ from being just black and green boxes, and [how do you] transform black and green boxes into artwork?”

Jenna: “I guess, I mean, perhaps it’s the shifting of the color from it being the store-bought color from the tube and the addition of the transparency, but I don’t believe that’s enough, just interesting colors, that’s why I give the viewer the option to see this concept of a thunder field, a meadow; I take it one step further… The reason I told you that is because I have curiosities about the answer you’re looking for- I don’t know the answer, I just think it’s interesting that he said so and that people walking past. Art has something, like, so simple and so formal, has the ability to be called great or crap or earth-shaking or fluid or you know, it’s like all these different descriptors, that yeah, I’m trying to answer that same question. But that’s what fascinates me about work, like, if I hadn’t used a certain shade of green, or black, or transparent ink in making that composition would he have not noticed, would he have not stopped to look? What is it that, what was the show-stopper in those pieces? That’s why I continue to do it, so I can present it and get answers to those questions or when something’s literally awesome” [laughs] “Like, you know, it just is. If it creates this mystery and awe there’s no explanation necessarily, I don’t know. I mean, that’s what I’m kind of striving for, but that guy seems to think it was cool, I don’t know.” [laughs again]

leigh: “So when you’re painting, what are you thinking? Like, I know you may be seeing something, you mentioned that you go out on the field and you were painting” [points to painting on wall] “does that painting have a name?”

Jenna: “Not really, not yet. I don’t know.”

leigh: “I think it was that one you that were painting out on the field, was it?”

Jenna: “Mm-hmm.”

leigh: “And what’re you thinking when you’re painting these?”

Jenna: “Well, that particular piece I was thinking ‘I don’t want to put a horizon line in this, I’m not gonna put the ground in it’ because I have had other paintings get so cluttered up because I’m mixing the paint on the canvas that the ground ends up screwing up the sky, and I also, you know, if I keep putting the ground in, I don’t want to be labeled a landscape painter. So with that painting, I was also focusing on the viscosity of the oil paint, I didn’t want to create this chunky gesture that happens when there’s not enough oil in the paint, and so I was focusing on making sure that that wasn’t going to happen, and focusing on not putting the ground in and so it becomes a much more formal piece when you look at it. I’ve known these painters that do like, all white paintings or all black paintings and I guess this is just one occasion of me kind of joining up with those people that just do these color field paintings. You know, and again it poses questions to the viewer like, what is it? Is it just a sensation, is it just a thought, is it a section of a sky, is it all about paint? It’s just, it’s there, and if you think about this tonight or like, you as a person, if you think about it a week from now when you’re at an art gallery orif you think about any of the work that you’ve seen in here or anybody’s work in general, if it’s something that helps, if it’s something that causes you to think and compare this to maybe a sky that you see when you’re driving home, or even if it’s awful, awful work, if you think about it in comparison to anything else, or you’re contemplating it, it’s helping your brain stay active and that’s another reason that art is good for you, it creates questions for your brain to navigate whether you know it or not, you know…I mean it’s true, people are always asking if you, I don’t like to call myself an artist, I prefer to call myself a painter, but I mean the artist has always held this really strange role in societies and sometimes it’s better than others in terms of the respect that they get, and especially now when people are constantly talking about the economy, and you’re in a sense the creator of these ‘luxury items’ like, art is seen as a total luxury item, but I don’t agree that that is where it should rest completely, I think art is…if we took it off our walls, like, I just can’t imagine, if you try to imagine looking around like when I look across the room and I see that painting there, and these here and if I just” [she snaps] “go like this and it would all not be there this place would, we’d both shrivel up, I mean this would be…you know what I mean? Art is really underestimated, it’s important, I think, in certain- by certain people, certain types of certain people I guess.”

leigh: “If you weren’t doing art –I know you’re doing other stuff besides art, obviously– but what do you think you’d be doing?”

Jenna: “If I wasn’t focusing strictly on pursuing my art career, I still don’t think I would be a schoolroom teacher, I wanna be a teacher eventually, like when I’m sixty I probably be an elementary school teacher, but life’s too short, I really wanna be a professional singer, I wanna do professional voice over work, and I have the map for those c