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ANGIE HUFFMAN & ROBERT JINKINS
September 7, 2019 - October 26, 2019
LOCATED IN SWEENEY GALLERY (3RD FLOOR)
Angie Huffman
I try to render scenes from generally unremarkable life events that bring me joy when I first see them. Though mundane, they reach out with a harmonious balance of composition and color. Quiet and wordless, they imply a visual narrative and ask for further consideration. Transporting these moments in time onto canvas allows me freeze them in a state where others also have the opportunity to reflect on their harmony. Hopefully the viewer will to go forth and find unexpected moments of personal radiance in their daily lives as well, like mindfulness meditation for the visual soul. Beauty and the mundane do not need to be not mutually exclusive.
I have called my work portraits for lack of a more accurate term, but I never feel their environments are subservient to their figures. They work together and do not compete. My source material is captured when life’s visual variables align in a fortuitous way and beg to be documented or (more commonly) is found in photographs previously judged unremarkable and left in storage. Painting a scene gives me ownership over every element in a way photographic reproduction could not, and the level of control I crave in all things.
Some critics have argued that realism is an outdated relic, perfected centuries ago and more recently replaced with photographic reproduction. I have never understood how reality, true human existence, could be unilaterally discounted. Now more than ever (in my short lifetime), reality itself is attacked and called into question. What better time to embrace realism once again?
Everyone sees the world through their own eyes, but the fabric of existence is still the same. With the endless problems and downfalls that life has, I will always focus on and celebrate what positivity it does provide.
Angie Huffman was born and raised near Dallas, Texas. She graduated from the University of North Texas with a BFA in Drawing and Painting in 2010. The school’s focus on contemporary and postmodernist work challenged her to find a way to act on her attraction to realism and portraiture while avoiding banality.
In 2014, after critical evaluation of her everyday life, Huffman relocated to Eastern Iowa. Lower costs of living and a healthier work-life balance have allowed her to devote more time and energy to her paintings. Her work has been included in exhibitions in Texas and throughout the Midwest.
Robert Jinkins
Growing up on a farm that has been in my family since 1849, I gained an admiration and reverence for the land that so many of my family members have worked upon. Like ghosts or spirits that walk the place, monument-like markers exist signifying the actions and lives of those who came before me: a tractor may remain parked as it has been for years since the last time it was driven; a broken crock full of metal now slowly sinks into the earth under years of maple leaves falling from the massive trees that my grandfather planted when he was six year old. I find stories on this farm and record them in my art. Recent additions to the farm and surrounding landscape, like some older relics, have almost cosmic significance to me—a dead cow in a low-lying pasture may represent sin, death, and redemption. I enjoy painting every blade of grass while allowing a disconcerting ambiguity to lurk below the surface in order to encourage viewers into a deeper dialogue with the paintings. The entire world is portrayed within each individual line of graphite or stroke of acrylic ink from which my drawings and paintings are woven.
Robert Jinkins is currently an MFA student at Iowa State’s Integrated studio arts program and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Platteville. Robert Jinkins is an emerging regional artist whose graphite and acrylic mixed media work focuses upon the people and landscape of the Midwest. Much of Robert’s subject matter comes from the family farm in Wisconsin that was homesteaded by an ancestor in 1849. In his work, strives to reflect the strength of the people and their history.
