Jen Garrido creates paintings that reflect internal dialogue, natural forms, and the materials she works with. She attunes to a study of self that guides her through feeling lost, found, and lost again. Formal elements are inspired by nature—they excavate, uncover, and unearth. And she attunes to her relationship with the medium of the paint or drawing materials, projecting images and forms from a play between her inner landscape and the outside world onto the surface of the canvas. Palette emerges from feeling rather than preconception.
Garrido’s paintings are meditations on the various parts of her identity. Her process is unstructured but results in the possibility of a structure, building something of a dictionary, or reference book, of the shapes she finds along the way. They are symptoms of an exploration of how shapes might relate to each other, repeating, climbing, leaning, and piling. Weighing ambiguity with representation, a desire for decoration, adding, subtracting, abstracting and transforming, she gradually arrives at a final composition.
A Los Angeles native, Garrido currently lives and works in San Francisco. In addition to being a painter, Jen Garrido is the artist behind Jenny Pennwood, her alter-art-ego and small-batch textile-based line of home goods and wearables. Ultimately, the bodies of work are in conversation with each other and are driven by the principle of a blissful alliance between all colors.
“So on the big level and on the little level and on every level in between, the slippage between control and finesse and form and wanting it to be good and adjusting things and trying to make it better. And between just like first thoughts, best thought, like let it all hang out, like do a thing, see what you’re surprised by. That tension is the tension of me making the work.”