By ADAM NUSSBAUM
Goshen, Ind — As a painter based in New York City, Jayne Holsinger may be daily surrounded by skyscrapers, but her recent work is concerned with rural, Midwestern subjects, specifically the lives of a Mennonite family living in Lancaster, Pa.
Beginning Sunday and continuing through January, the public can view her work at a show titled “A Visual Offering,” at Goshen College’s Hershberger Art Gallery.
Holsinger’s interest in the Mennonite faith is not haphazard. Born to Brethren and Mennonite parents in Mishawaka, she regularly attended Mennonite family reunions, as well as the Osceola Church of the Brethren until she was 13.
When asked about her subject matter and family roots, she said, “It’s not often that I get to reflect on where I’ve come from in life so specifically, and how it’s led to and informs my painting now.”
The exhibited work will include paintings from two series, completed a decade apart. According to Holsinger, the first series (1994-96), which is based on quilt forms, is more abstract. In it, she collaged images gathered from women’s magazines spanning 1910 to 1960. The second series (2004-07) is the study of a Lancaster, Pa., Mennonite family and community. She said she decided to include these specific works due to the series’ “relevancy to Mennonites, and the interesting overlap of the one series to the other.”
To Holsinger, the title of the show, “A Visual Offering,” “seemed culturally appropriate to the Mennonite theme.”
Part of Holsinger’s interest in employing Mennonites as subject matter for her work grew from her research of 17th century Dutch painting.
“Dutch Mennonites not only sat as models for Rembrandt, but became painters and patrons themselves,” she said. “That was perfect.”
In the recent “Mennonites” series, Holsinger has “attempted to bring the two worlds together within the same picture frame: the high visual splendor of art history ... into the portraits of my subdued Mennonite subjects.” In a portrait titled “Mrs. Horst,” one of Picasso’s famous “Sunflowers” sits in the foreground on a kitchen table, while the subject turns her back to the viewer and washes dishes.
Holsinger’s research has had personal implications, as well.
“A great part of researching the Mennonites has been a reassessment and reconciliation with the community,” she said. Holsinger said she sees problems within the tradition, but in the paintings she attempts to reaffirm what is there rather than criticize.
“My respect for the work Mennonites do in the world has grown tremendously,” Holsinger said. “So much so, I’ve joined forces and volunteer monthly in a homeless shelter.” This is her eighth year volunteering. She is also a member of Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship.
Along with research, Holsinger said, emotions and ideas often guide her in choosing subject matter. She is an “empathetic and perceptual painter,” but through a process she began employing in 1990 of painting images from photographs, she has also become concerned with work stemming from ideas rather than purely emotion.
“If pressed,” Holsinger said, “I’d say that my work expresses both peace (patience) and conflict, and every once in a while a subtle humor comes through in the way I’ve chosen to present it.” Or so others have told her, she added.
Gwen Penner, the show’s organizer, said Holsinger’s work was chosen for exhibit based on its quality, and “how it fits with the community.” One of the gallery’s main purposes, she said, is for education, and Holsinger’s work is relevant to subject matter being taught at Goshen College.
Holsinger will also give a talk to Goshen College students about being an artist in New York.
Personally, Penner said, she enjoys how Holsinger “captures the personalities of people in her work, and how she does portraiture.” She also likes Holsinger’s insertion of 17th century Dutch imagery into her own pieces.
This strategy of showing the past inhabiting the present, and the way in which the two coexist and enhance one another, could be seen as analogous to how Holsinger says art and personal experience relate in her own life.
“Art-making is central to my life,” she said. “It’s not an overstatement to say that painting has defined me as a person and brought me into contact with the world more so than any other aspect of my life. That contact with the world can be described as the development of my ability to see and learn, as well as my exposure to different peoples, places and things.”
Holsinger is married to an artist, Brooklyn born-poet Hugh Seidman.
“By choosing a creative partner, I also chose the kind of support and inspiration that such a relationship offers,” she said. “He’s working creatively just as I’m working creatively. It’s a process we share.”
Holsinger also belongs to an artists’ community in Manhattan called Westbeth, which is comprised of 400 apartments, “occupied by artists of all disciplines — actors, musicians, curators, playwrights, you name it. I’m literally surrounded by artists in New York.”
Holsinger developed her sensibility and love for painting in the eighth grade, due to “an excellent art teacher named James Turkus” at Schmucker Middle School.
“The experience in my public school art classes was enough to establish a sense of myself as an artist, that I was pretty good at it, and set the clear path that I would go to art school,” she said.
After high school, Holsinger attended the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Fla., and then Indiana University in Bloomington for one year, where she met and studied under the painter Robert Barnes. She eventually made her way to New York in 1988, and enrolled in the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. Of that experience, Holsinger said, “The immersion there, studying for three years with first- and second-generation members of the New York School Abstract Expressionists set my course and commitment to painting.”
Since then, Holsinger’s work has been shown in New York, Zurich, Milan, Berlin and Istanbul. She recently earned a master of fine arts degree from the Transart Institute, a low-residency new media program in Linz, Austria. She also teaches drawing at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
Living in an urban environment has “brought out the rural in me,” Holsinger said. “It has enhanced my appreciation of it.” She said that one of the benefits of living in New York is that she gets to “see what other painters are doing, firsthand, and discover new ways of seeing. It’s stimulating. That gets into the work, no matter what my subject.”
Conversely, she said, “My horror is that if I were to move back to the Midwest I’d begin painting cityscapes with skyscrapers.”
