Jane Shoenfeld

My abstract series in response to the WB Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” reached completion when I had a major exhibit of this work in March 2022. Then late that spring, I went to Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM to work en plein air. It was so windy and dusty, I couldn’t leave my rented cottage and go outside to paint. Fortunately, the sitting area had large windows and in front of a nearly invisible horizon sat the chamisas, bowing and blowing in the agitated air.  

So I focused on the bushes and began this current series with ”Chamisa Unfurled.” My yard where I live in Santa Fe is filled with chamisa, a ubiquitious bush, native to North Central New Mexico. I am carefully observing these plant beings and also the structure of human faces.  In this series of pastel paintings, I combine and dissolve images of my own face and white hair with feathery chamisa. My goal is to merge the structural with the  magical. Although careful observation has always grounded me, ultimately I prefer ambiguity in the visual information I present. 

Color’s emotional impact is also central. Much of the time, because I am working with a gestalt that can complete in a number of ways, I simplify my process with a predetermined palette. My medium of choice is pastel. I work in layers. 

When I moved to NM in 1987, I chose painting and my attraction to endless space over New York City’s grid. I’d grown up in the DC area and when it came time to go to college, I chose Pratt Institute, both for it’s location and because I got scholarships there. I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Pratt and also studied painting at a graduate level at Brooklyn College. 

In more recent times and coming out of the pandemic, life has been full.  In addition to my one person exhibit at Strata, I exhibited a series of pastels based on the WB Yeats’ poem The Second Coming at the spacious Visual Arts Gallery of the Santa Fe Community College. This two person exhibit, "Paintings and Poetry: the Center Cannot Hold" was the culmination of four years of absorption in Yeats’ prophetic poem. Many of these works were begun at a VCCA residency in October 2017. An additional residency at Jentel Arts in Wyoming, was also a gift. 

My  artwork has been shown in solo shows and various curated and juried exhibitions in the Northeast and in the Southwest. I am grateful to The First Street Gallery in Chelsea, NYC for many years of representation. My work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections including NYNEX, Strock, Strock and Lavan, the Natalie Goldberg Collection and the NM Highway and Transportation Department.  Recently three abstract landscapes won purchase awards through NM Art in Public Places, and will be placed in the  new hospital tower of UNM Hospital. Coming up in 2024, 24 of my pastel paintings will be displayed in an exhibit curated by Regina Held, "Movers and Shakers - Artists Who Teach, Lead and Inspire" at the NM Cancer Center, ABQ. My work has also been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Las Cruces Museum and the Millicent Rogers Museum. 

Although no longer part of academia, I continue to teach landscape painting in the spring and summer and every winter I hold a series of classes in my studio. I've organized and taught residential workshops at Ghost Ranch for 30 years. I taught art therapy and creative process for 15 years at the former College of Santa Fe.

Art and life merge. I live among chamisa. I’m married to a poet. His study is across the hall from my studio. Petals in the Tunnel, a book of my paintings and poetry was published last year. The first poem in the book is titled “The Chamisa is a Ghost With Pale Green Wings.”

As an addendum: Included here are two fire pieces.  Our forests, our chamisa, our high desert expanses are threatened each year as the wind blows. The air is extremely dry in North Central New Mexico.  With climate change, the dangers from fire increase. “Mora” is a small mixed media piece created in 2022 during a season of wildly spreading fire. Mora is a the name of a small NM county devastated by wild fire. “Archetypal Fireball“ is an interior fire.