Senior art show season is just around the corner as the first show, featuring pastel paintings and sketched portraitures by Jessica Jorgenson and photography by Rebecca Tenpenny, opens Dec. 1.
Jessica Jorgenson has been drawing for most of her life and has had a clear passion for art from a young age. Inspired by artist Paula Rego, Jorgenson chose pastels and wood panels as her mediums, seeing pastels as a bridge between painting and drawing.
“It’s intensely colorful like paint, but still a drawing medium. You get a strong mark with the chalk pastel,” said Jorgenson.
Inspired also by artist Alice Neel, Jorgenson explored the study of portraiture. She has followed two separate tracks for her show: doing large-scale full-color pastel paintings of people she knows well and a series of short portrait sessions of people she’s never met. Her procedure for meeting them was itself quite unique: she posted an ad in the BUBBS classifieds folder asking for sitters and was rather surprised by the large response.
“The one hour studies were of people who responded to my BUBBS posting…there’s a strange kind of community that’s represented who replied and were willing and eager [to be drawn] and I was willing and eager to draw them,” said Jorgenson.
The familiarity and intimacy expressed in the large-scale, color pastel portraits play off the abruptness of the small, short charcoal studies, exploring the interaction between an artist and her model.
Rebecca Tenpenny has been a photographer since high school, but found her artistic calling while here at Biola. Her senior show work is also portraiture, but specifically of her family. Inspired by the photography of Sally Mann, Tenpenny took a different approach to family portraiture.
“She [Mann] is the anti-sentimental family photographer,” said Tenpenny. “She’s what I want to be — I don’t want people to think ‘Oh how sweet, she took pictures of her family,’ I want them to be works of art that happen to be photos of my family.”
Tenpenny’s process with these photos is also different from the average photographer — she shot her portraits on 8×10 film camera and developed the photos by hand in the darkroom. The choice of film over digital was significant for Tenpenny, not only as an aesthetic decision but a personal one as well.
“A lot of people are fantastic digital portrait photographers, but for me, I like the slowing-down of the process of taking a person’s picture with a large format camera,” she said. “I love the hands-on format of the darkroom — my blood, sweat and tears are in every single print.”
This care and intense study comes through in her photos — in every portrait are traces of universal human experiences, things people can relate to without knowing Mann’s family.
Portraits, pastels, and photography — this unique harmony shared between Tenpenny and Jorgenson’s work only adds to the energy of the individual shows. Not simply two seniors displaying their work, it becomes almost a larger show exploring the theme of the portraits: identity, familiarity, community and family. The show opens Dec. 1 and promises to be an exciting, beautiful start to the senior show season.
