Jackie Battenfield is an artist known for her luminously colored paintings and prints of natural forces. Her works explore her fascination with the most abstract qualities of landscape–storms, clouds, brushfires, and water ripples. “My painting practice is to work with watery pigments, I pour sweep, brush, drip, and fling layers of paint like clouds scudding across the sky. I coax pools of paint into translucent veils of color. Anchoring these ephemeral elements are gestural tree limbs, horizontal watermarks, stripes, and blocks of color. In the prints, I have been working with handmade papers from Asia for twenty years. I relate my mark making to the array of expressive materials and textures imbedded in the paper, such as bamboo leaves, horsehair, and gold leaf, or the rippled edge of a handmade paper. Working with these materials, my experience is one of collaboration with an unknown paper maker on the other side of the world.”

Jackie Battenfield was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1950, received her MFA in Visual Art from Syracuse University (1978) and a BS from Pennsylvania State University (1971). For the last twenty years, she has made a living from her art and is a popular motivational speaker on the challenges of sustaining a successful career in the visual arts. A survey of her graphic works, Moments of Change, was presented at the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond (2009), and will travel to the University of Arizona, Tucson in 2011. Galleries throughout the United States represent her work including: Addison-Ripley, Washington, D.C.; Addington Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; and DM Contemporary, New York. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Award (1991) and the Warren Tanner Award (1996). Her work is represented in more than 1000 collections worldwide including the New York Public Library, NY; The Zimmerli Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, NJ; Palmer Museum, University Park, PA; Museum of Art at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ; and the United States Embassy Collections, Brazil, Cambodia, Croatia, Jamaica, and Peru.

She teaches in the graduate program at Columbia University and is the author of The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love, Da Capo Press, 2009.

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http://www.jackiebattenfield.com