| Jane Bazinet |
| In recent years Jane Bazinet has emerged as an important American artist. Born in Basile, Louisiana, she began painting during the 1960’s. Bazinet studied at Arizona State University for five years and continued studying art thereafter as an apprentice under the able tutelage of several painters. While in Arizona Bazinet began entering competitions and soon began accepting numerous cash awards. In Scottsdale, Arizona her paintings and prints soon found their way into collections both public and private, and the galleries across the world. Although Bazinet has worked in numerous mediums, deftly treating a variety of themes, she is best known for her lyrical figurative work, which dwells at a mysterious crossroads between poetic realism and abstract expressionism. She has been recognized as an artist with an extremely personal style and technique that is at once romantic and contemporary. Her interest in the history of architecture led her to study Art History at San Francisco State University, but the call of art pulled her on further to major in sculpture. All the while she continued to paint watercolor, as it was her favorite medium after all. She then moved to England and studied etching in a small school in Putney. Finding her way to Wimbledon, she met a teacher who had perhaps the greatest influence on her. It was here that her figurative work began to take root and grow to maturity. When asked what influences she could cite in her work, Bazinet responded: “Everything I do is influenced by my upbringing in Louisiana; for whatever reason I do it, however I do it, why I think, the things I eat, the car I drive, the swamps I like, being adventurous. It has to do with some kind of freedom that influences everything you do –everything.” “I would go other places and found that no one was as happy as we were. When I left there, everybody was unhappy to be a woman for some reason. They were out trying to be liberated and I thought I already was. No one ever told me there was anything wrong with being whatever I wanted to be. I don’t like to paint unhappiness anymore. I think it is totally unnecessary.” “In my early years as an artist I was painting soft, feminine forms and I was dissatisfied with the lack of strength in my work. I was studying when under a wise and talented man, I remember telling him that I wanted to paint strongly; I wanted to paint like a man. My teacher smiled warmly and said, ‘Yes, you should paint strongly, but not like a man. Rather, you should find that strength in your own femininity.’ That is what I have striven to do.” |
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