Jeanne Wilkinson

Formerly an abstract painter, Jeanne Wilkinson’s paintings and drawings are now elements in complex collages and animations that merge fantasy and reality. Using tools like Photoshop, After Effects, Garageband and a Nikon D-90, she creates a kind of digital alchemy, often starring her Painted People, former Barbies, Kens and GI Joes transformed into a clan who traverse worlds both real and virtual.

Wilkinson’s latest Painted People collage, ‘Deliver Us,’ brings to mind Baroque ceiling paintings where creatures, angels and gods float in unearthly realms. The image was derived by merging a photograph of the Painted People (taken by her son, photographer Andrew Yonda) with her photos of the British Petroleum Skandi ROV 1 internet “live feed” while oil was billowing into the Gulf of Mexico. It depicts a kind of environmental “Last Judgment,’ a tipping point from which ever more explosive changes will take place faster and faster unless…or is there an “unless”?

In May, 2010, her short animation “GreenHeart” premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). ‘GreenHeart’ is part of her Colassa self-portrait series wherein the female Colossus, both being and light, is in the process of inheriting the earth. She mysteriously appears, transforms her environment, then disappears. In the Colassa world, nature and art endure.

Wilkinson’s vivid sense of color and respect for earthly beauty reflects her childhood spent on Minnesota lakes, accentuated by time spent on a rural commune and eight years of dairy farming in Wisconsin. Subsequently, she earned her MFA at Pratt and now shares a studio in downtown Brooklyn with her husband, artist Frank Lind. Her artwork has been shown extensively in New York and internationally. She teaches art and art history at Pratt Institute and Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY.