Jeanie Tomanek produces at least one poem a day, but she does it with a paintbrush.
The 72-year-old self-taught artist calls her ethereal dreamscapes “narrative art,” and they tell the story of the feminine archetype she calls “Everywoman.” Appearing like sylphs or the occasional crone, her figures are both primitive and exquisite, like cave paintings that invite interpretation. Haunting and elongated, they shimmer on the canvas and seem to whisper ancient secrets in the moonlight.
“My figures often bear the scars and imperfections, that, to me, characterize the struggle to become,” says Tomanek, a petite woman with a warm smile who lives in a Marietta subdivision. She gestures to her 15-foot-by-15-foot studio, with its paint-spattered floor, and says, “I don’t have a grand, industrial space where I work, just here.”
Inspired by literature, folktales and myths, Tomanek explores the wisdom of women and their journey from childhood to old age, noting the significance of events, emotions, dreams and memories.
This storytelling element of her work resonates with writers. Her work graces the covers of 20 books, mostly poetry collections, and she is represented by The Loft in Marietta, as well as galleries in Houston, Texas, and Birmingham, Alabama. She has amassed an international following among people who seek symbolism in brushstrokes. Among her collectors is actress Emma Thompson.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
While Tomanek has painted male figures in the past, most of her subjects wear ground-grazing skirts. Dogs serve as animal familiars. In her extensive body of work, nature heals, gentleness signals strength and sisterhood is powerful.
Many of her paintings explore the concept of blossoming. Some may call Tomanek a “late bloomer.” She did not start painting until age 50.
Born Shirley Jeanne Robinson, the fourth of seven children, in Batavia, New York, Tomanek grew up rambling around the dairy country of the Genesee Valley. “I was a tomboy who idolized the Iroquois,” she says. Her grandmother and two uncles were artists, but Tomanek wanted to be a poet. She attended Kent State for a while and married her husband, Dennis, at 20. In the early 1980s, they moved to Atlanta with daughter, Mara.
Tomanek worked several jobs that did not exactly feed her soul — human resources, real estate, accounting. Her husband bought a novelty T-shirt company, and she learned that she enjoyed the design aspect of it. Soon enough, she was drawing, and then painting, teaching herself, dab by dab. She has never taken a painting lesson. “I don’t do sketches beforehand, and I have no color rules,” she says. “I’m naive,” she says proudly. Her influences include surrealist Leonora Carrington, Georgia O’Keeffe and Caravaggio. She started in oils but now usually relies on acrylics.
She entered her first completed painting, “Tomato,” in a competition at the Atlanta Artists Center in Buckhead and won first prize. A collector offered her $1,500 and a two-week time-share in Paris. “I didn’t sell, and I’m glad now that I didn’t,” she says, pointing to the bold, red painting that still dominates her parlor. She likes to remember how she started.
Tomanek gradually shifted into figurative work. Her father suffered a stroke, and Tomanek found herself tending both him and her sister, who was disabled and partially paralyzed by a childhood accident. “My sister moved in with us, and we treated her like a little princess,” Tomanek says. Caregiving remains a leitmotif in her work. “Whatever is happening to me at any given time goes into the paintings,” she says.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
She started showing and working at the now shuttered artist co-op Heaven Blue Rose in Roswell, which exposed her to other creatives and collectors. She read “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron for inspiration and “Women Who Run with the Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, which gave her a nourishing vein of material. “One of my favorite stories is the ‘Handless Maiden,’ about a woman’s journey when she feels controlled by outside forces,” says Tomanek. “It shows up in my work often, along with Demeter and Persephone. I love that longing and poignancy between a mother and daughter.”
Tinkering with this gossamer sensibility, Tomanek eventually arrived at Everywoman, a bald and faceless feminine figure that figures prominently in her paintings.
“I was immediately struck by the shorn, ghost-like women striding across the landscape of each of Jeanie’s canvases,” says poet Eleanor Hooker. “I found that utterly compelling.”
Hooker used a Tomanek painting of a levitating woman wearing a crown and a pair of Mary Janes for a frontispiece on her chapbook. She also began collecting the artist’s work and hanging it by her desk to inspire her writing.
“’Dancing as Fast as I Can,’ one of the poems in my chapbook “Legion,” and included in my recent collection, “Of Ochre and Ash,” was inspired by one of her paintings with the same title,” says Hooker.
Tomanek’s Everywoman figure particularly appeals to those who are facing a challenge or negotiating a passage.
“I had just lost my home and everything I owned in a house fire, and at the same time had transitioned through menopause,” says collector Baxter Claire Trautman. “I wanted a work that would represent this next stage of my life so I asked her to paint a portrait of the goddess Hecate. I now have five originals plus three prints and laughingly refer to my home as the Tomanek West Gallery.”
Poet Anya Krugovoy Silver had breast cancer when she discovered Tomanek and used her art on two book covers before she died in 2018. Silver, who had lost her hair with chemotherapy, wrote a moving poem about crows that hold funerals for each other, so Tomanek painted “Fledgling,” with Everywoman protectively embraced by a large, black bird.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
“Jeanie’s paintings are evocative, fairy-tale spaces where loss blurs into wonder, trauma into resilience, the human form into nature, nature into the supernatural,” says Krugovoy’s husband, Andrew Silver. “Her paintings make pain, suffering and isolation iconic, and in lending shape to these scars shows us to a kind of deeper resilience.”
The perspective of maturity, in other words, and a woman’s fruitful journey in a world that seldom feels like a fairy tale. “In much of my work, a woman may be facing difficulty, darkness even, but I try to portray the strength there, and give the viewer optimism that she will prevail. She will survive.”
Tomanek has no regrets for arriving at this station in midlife.
“I wouldn’t have had the things to say or share or the wisdom, if I had started painting full time when I was younger,” she says. “It happened when it was supposed to happen and made my work richer because of it.”
