Friday Focus: Josie Jenkins
Josie Jenkins is an artist based in Liverpool UK. She studied for her BA Hons in Fine Art (Painting) at Norwich School of Art and Design, graduating in 2002 and has since exhibited in the UK and internationally. Josie was born in The East Riding of Yorkshire and lived in Hull and Nottinghamshire, before settling in Liverpool.
Josie's work is concerned with both the making of visual art and the organising and execution of artistic projects, including producing exhibitions, writing and facilitating platforms for artists to engage with one another and with the public.
Recent exhibitions include ‘Assembled Worlds’ solo show at Bluecoat, Liverpool and ‘Refractive Pool: Contemporary Painting in Liverpool', a group exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. This was also curated by Josie and Brendan Lyons as part of a wider project called Refractive Pool, led by both artists. The project examined contemporary painting in Liverpool and also included a publication.
Can you tell me about your practice? How do you get started on a piece of work?
I mainly make paintings using acrylic and oil paint, but sometimes I draw and use print. I make decisions about what to paint gradually over time. The thoughts sort of hang around in my head for a while until I’m ready to put them down. Most of the time at the moment I make a composition by bringing together a number of images from a variety of sources, like a collage, but in the past I have also worked from just one single image. I’m trying to use images that I’m drawn to and bring them together in a harmonious way.
I plan the paintings out quite carefully by arranging images together using a photo editing computer program. This is why I think of it like making a collage. The images come from photographs I’ve taken or just from the internet. I’ll search for things I know I’d like to paint and see what comes up. Once I’ve settled on the overall image I’ll reconstruct it as a painting and then it sometimes changes along the way; I’ll decide to change things because of something that comes up when I try to replicate it with paint or because of new thoughts and ideas that come to me while I’m making the painting.
Who or what are your biggest influences?
I’ve wondered about this question for a while but I’m actually not sure what the answer is. I have loved the work of many artists over the years but I don’t know if I would say their work has had an impact on my own, or at least not one artist in particular. I like looking at the way other artists have used paint and noticing what kind of work by other artists I am myself drawn to. Sometimes I see paintings that I love and will think, ‘I’d like to make a painting like that.’ This happened a few years ago with Raffi Kalenderian. I saw his paintings of interior settings and I thought they were just brilliant. I wanted to make paintings ‘like’ that. So I started making paintings of interior settings but of course they were nothing like Raffi Kalenderian’s.
I’m definitely influenced by the things I see around me in daily life. I see things when I cycle to town that I think I’d like to put in a landscape and I sort of file them away in my mind somewhere. A few years ago I went to China for an artists’ residency and I took so much influence from that environment. I found it incredibly stimulating in China but I don’t always find it easy to describe why. I remember coming back to the UK and thinking everything was so tidy and controlled and I didn’t really like that. Perhaps there are just more extremes in China. In Xiamen, where I was staying, you could see heavy industry alongside beautiful beaches. Xiamen is a major holiday destination for Chinese people and many newly weds go there to have photographs taken on the beach. There was such beautiful strange incongruity when this would happen against a beautiful sunset with cranes and cooling towers in the distance and a huge container ship passing by. I wanted to try and sort of sum this up in a painting.
Order and chaos and the interplay between the two provides a context for your work, can you explain your interest in this further?
I actually think that my obsession with order and chaos is not unique, it’s very human and the most beautiful art is always a perfect balance of these things. I think it is more that I am very conscious of it and when I’m considering what to include in a painting, where different things should be positioned and how they should be painted I am actively thinking about this balance of order and chaos. As much as I’d like to say my work is ‘about’ something very meaningful or important, what I actually believe is that the best paintings draw you in because of the image you see as a whole. If the images used have any kind of significance or depict some kind of narrative then this is secondary to the impact of the complete vision in front of you.
I think that when you start thinking about order and chaos you realise it relates to so much about the human condition. There is a relationship between the way our minds work and the way we organise stuff in the world. And then of course the same goes for how we want to see things organised in a painting, what we find pleasing to look at. Humans have evolved to be attracted to certain visual things. We like certainty because it gives us security, so we like repeated patterns and things that we already know and love and these things relate to order. But we also like unexpected things, we evolved to both survive and spread our genes, so we’re always on the lookout for opportunity, the unexpected, the break in the pattern that may lead to something interesting. These things relate to chaos. As humans we are interested in a combination of the two, but they are in a trade off with each other and different people have different tipping points for the perfect balance of course.
I choose specific images and motifs for a variety of reasons. In some cases they have symbolic or metaphorical meaning and other times I want to paint things that are ubiquitous in the world around us. I often focus on images the conjure up a sense of wonder. I don’t always know why I am particularly drawn to something. I find humour in taking images from one setting and placing them in another, in the same way that I am curiously amused when I see something seemingly out of place in the landscape. This kind of incongruity is a theme that runs throughout my work.
I use ‘The Masters Hand Soap’ to clean my brushes. The same brand actually does a brush cleaner and the soap I use is really meant for your hands, but I find it more useful to scrub against a soap bar and I think it works really well as part of my brush cleaning ritual.
Finally, is there anything new coming up that you would like to tell us about?
I’ve been enjoying making a screen print of one of my artworks in collaboration with a printmaker called Kate Hodgson in the Bluecoat Print Studios. Bluecoat | Print Studio (thebluecoat.org.uk) The opportunity was supported by funding from the Ulrike Michal Foundation for the Arts and the limited edition of prints will be for sale via the Bluecoat.
I’m also working on a project called Shuffle with another Liverpool based artist called Max Mallender. We produce events that bring together contemporary art and music at one off exhibitions opening on a Friday night with live DJs, a licensed bar. The exhibition is then open to visitors for the weekend. The Shuffle events have a real DIY vibe. The last three events we put on were in vacant properties in Liverpool and we’re hoping to find a good venue for another Shuffle event soon. SHUFFLE (@__.shuffle) • Instagram photos and videos
Image Details
1. After Doig with Outdoor Swimming Pool, 2021, acrylic and oil on canvas, 200cm x 150cm
2. Willow Pattern Stories - Collect and Discard, 2017, acrylic and ink on canvas, 200cm x 130cm.
3. After Turner with Lego, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 200cm x 150cm
4. Sky Fishing, 2022, acrylic and oil on canvas, 200cm x 140cm
5. Willow Pattern Stories - Rewrite History, 2017, acrylic and ink on canvas, 200cm x 130cm.
6. After Thomas Cole with Hot Air Balloon, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 200cm x 160cm
7. Willow Pattern Stories - Finest of Treasures, 2017, acrylic and ink on canvas, 200cm x 130cm.