Very Strange Days: The Paintings of Jenny Morgan
In the process of painting someone, artist Jenny Morgan reveals not only what shows, but what doesn’t show. Her vibrant and emotional oil paintings of figures hover in a place that is between realism and abstraction, where many of her subjects confront their viewer with an electric stare that braves against the vulnerable moment in which they are portrayed. Nudity is a primary requirement of Morgan’s subjects. Using the naked body as her work’s foundation, she likens the human figure to an incredible structure that she can blur and distort—a point of exhilaration that occurs with every piece she creates.
Tucked away in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, there is an old warehouse studio with hardwood floors and a long wall of windows, lined with curtains and filled with the occasional aroma of a warm, cooked meal and the whistle of a tea kettle. In one corner is a lounge chair, where Morgan sits and contemplates the next brushstroke of her latest painting. The room is decorated with potted plants and her paintbrushes drying in jars, and onthe floor is a veil of sawdust, the remnants of her building stretcher bars and frames for her pieces from the day before. Stacked against a wall that she uses as an easel are paintings in various stages of completion, colorful and ruthlessly honest portraits of the people that intrigue her, including her close friends and their children, and even herself.
In our first interview with Jenny Morgan in Hi-Fructose Volume 21, she shared that, as a young woman, she innately feels a close connection to the female form, and being an artist is an intrinsic part of who she is. “I do what I do because it’s the most authentic way for me to live. My view is that being an artist by definition means that you are driven to create the images and sounds that come from within—and if you are not able, or are restricted in some way, that block causes pain,” she says.
She was born into a creative family in Salt Lake, Utah in 1982, the daughter of an architect who fostered her imagination and individuality from the very beginning. Morgan’s first vivid memory associated with art takes place in preschool, where she remembers drawing a house and then adding a single horizontal line across it. This was her first discovery of the principle of perspective and the power of lines in a drawing to improve the overall picture, and the thrill of that discovery has stayed with her to this day.
Her particularly brilliant use of color was an evolution that began in graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in New York during the fall of 2006—the result of a collaboration with fellow artist David Mramor, whose bold, abstract strokes pushed her to be more explorative with her own creative choices. Much of her career as an artist has been spent trying to create the clearest path for her inspiration and providing it with a place to land.
I understand that I am drawn to the nude not just because of its art historical roots, but also because of my own discomfort with sensuality. It’s a duality—I thrive on the vulnerability of skin and then at moments I feel mortally embarrassed and exposed.
The root of Morgan’s work starts with the photo shoots that she conducts with her models. This is where the intense bond is formed between artist and subject, and that initial feeling of tension and exposure in her portraits is one that originates from this process. “Asking these people to be vulnerable with me and my lens creates a unique moment that I thrive on throughout the duration of the making the painting. Ironically though, I do see my use of color as a form of clothing or a cover. The color glazing and other techniques that I use, like blurring and sanding, do offer distance between the viewer and the vulnerable, naked subject.” Morgan works directly from her printed photographic references and builds up at least two layers of the painted figure, before she chooses to blur the wet paint, and sand down the dry paint using sandpaper, or apply a think color glaze on top of the figure. These alterations to the realism are her way of departing from the “real” world and placing the subject in a new space.
Concerned with creating a raw and emotionally genuine portrait, her goal is never to flatter. “What I love most about my work is being able to connect with the people in my life in a way not possible by other means,” she says.
Scale, as well as color, is an equally important aspect of Morgan’s work. Some of her paintings feature multiple full-scale bodies on monumental sized canvases, her largest measuring between six-to-eight feet tall and five feet wide. “It’s important for me that the figure be larger than life. I scale up the body so that it feels more than human and outside of daily experience. The size and scale of the painting is always determined by how much space I feel the individual needs to psychically and physically occupy,” she explains. The incorporation of colors like true reds, yellows, blues, and oranges, and graphical elements are picked up subconsciously from her environment in the studio or studies. These graphic qualities are juxtaposed with the more refined components, particularly in the face, hands, and genitals, an overt sexuality that is the most tender aspect of Morgan’s art, especially of her self-portraits. “I understand that I am drawn to the nude not just because of its art historical roots, but also because of my own discomfort with sensuality. It’s a duality—I thrive on the vulnerability of skin and then at moments I feel mortally embarrassed and exposed. I choose to confront the discomfort and explore that which challenges me most.”
Historically, the nude has been used as both an expression of beauty and human qualities, as well as transformed by artists into an aesthetic object.
Morgan’s paintings balance a fine line between the two, both incorporating beautiful aesthetics and design, and elaborating on her subject’s unique complexion. With each new piece, she exercises her abstract voice more. “I feel as though I naturally teeter along many lines and find the quality of the work both frustrating and empowering.
For me, defining individuality in a portrait is to embed the painting with a soul or sensation of a specific person. This individuation is best accomplished with direct eye contact between the subject matter and the viewer,” she says. The concept of the nude’s gaze first became popular with the rise of postmodern philosophy and social theory, namely French intellectual Jacques Lacan’s analysis of the gaze’s role as a mirror of the human psyche. This idea extended into feminist theory, where it can deal with how men look at women—and vice versa, how women look at themselves.
It was a heavy time and I processed everything through the use of color—the intense hues were comforting and stabilizing.
“I do believe that the female gaze upon the male nude is a very important perspective in the art world and should be explored,” Morgan suggests. “I am just now feeling like I want to return back to the male subject matter. I am just waiting for the right person to portray.”
She has continued to implement these ideas in recent works, focused on coupling her subject’s soft expressions with a deeper sense of self and conceptual motifs. In her 2015 exhibition All We Have Is Now, Morgan stressed the importance of being present psychologically and appreciating the time that we are given. Largely, the “suffering” we humans feel is the result of something that has happened to us in the past or an apprehension of something in the future. If you really think about it, the root to most of the “problems” we face can be fixed, or significantly reduced, by simply being in the moment.
The exhibit represented some of Morgan’s most personal works to date, created out of a time when she was grieving deeply. “It was the first time in my life that I was truly introduced to death,” she shares. “Death became more than a concept—he became an entity.” Death takes on the form of a skeleton in one of her favorite paintings in that exhibit, titled “Skeleton Woman,” which symbolizes Morgan’s grief that she felt needed to be pulled up and brought to light. “It was a heavy time and I processed everything through the use of color—the intense hues were comforting and stabilizing. Painting is a form of meditation and forced me to be in the moment with the pain and work through it.” This image could almost be read like a ying–yang, where the weightless pose of a girl is interconnected with the heaviness of the skeleton, yet it does not crush her.
What I love most about my work is being able to connect with the people in my life in a way not possible by other means.”
Morgan found herself greatly inspired as she researched into religious iconography, and other works like “You Only Live Once”—a self-portrait of the artist with the essence of a new life, a baby—draw parallels to the Madonna and Child, specifically, Michaelangelo’s “Pieta.” In the context of spirituality, the world that Morgan’s figures exist in is a place that shifts in and out of mistiness, an alternate non-physical realm. “I want my figures to exist in a nondescript atmosphere of color. The subject must be free of anything that anchors them to the ground or positions them in space. I don’t think of them as physical beings, but more as psychic ideas of the individual.” Amongst the images of death, she also lays bare her own concerns about motherhood, self-perception, and the future.
Profoundly intimate, yet thoroughly universal, the works in All We Have Is Now achieved a striking intensity and psychological depth, breaking through the ideals of Morgan’s previous portraiture. This involved looking at the ways in which her experiences affected her and finding a way to move forward. “I do think that our past can define us,” she says. “It is the story we tell and justifications we supply. Once we understand and recognize the lasting affects of our past within us, we can then work to release and distance ourselves in order to create a new narrative. Confronting the dark shadows of our psyche is tremendously challenging and I am thankful that I have a safe space, such as painting, that allows me to take a look, uproot it all, [and] let go.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 39, which is sold out. Get our latest issue in print with a new Hi-Fructose subscription here.
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