Like many creatives who depend on a functioning arts ecosystem to make a living, artists have reckoned with various obstacles during COVID-19, from canceled exhibitions to social isolation and a seemingly endless pandemic.
“It has been a struggle to be an artist during this time,” artist Jeni Stallings admits. “But I do think some of the greatest works come out of strife. I do believe that.”
The Atlanta painter will be featuring the fruits of her pandemic-era labor at her new Reynoldstown studio Oct. 2 and 3, secured with the help of a government stimulus check. Stallings creates her lyrical, dreamy paintings using the ancient encaustic technique that entails heating highly flammable beeswax to coat the painting’s surface. So it was important that she move that volatile process out of the home where she lives with her husband and 11-year-old son. So Stallings rented a studio in a former church that has given her the chance to both sell her paintings directly to customers and also change how she works.
Credit: Jeni Stallings
Credit: Jeni Stallings
“I had much bigger things to work on,” she says, and the 1,000 square foot studio affords new possibilities.
A native of Jonesboro, Arkansas, and graduate of the Memphis College of Art, Stallings creates work that often draws from her dreams and personal experiences. She tends to render those moments in a muted, femininity-infused surrealism far from the hard-edged style of notable Surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico or Salvador Dali. With their layers of beeswax sealing a moment into memory, her paintings draw from a lexicon melding dreamwork with a touch of Southern eccentricity. In Stallings’ work a woman floats through space or peers out from inside an underwater diving bell.
“I feel like I was made to push people out of their comfort zone by opening a dialogue about what it is like to be a woman in the South, in this country or in this world. The paintings are a record of my response to my environment,” says Stallings, including the ritual of Southern churchgoing.
Credit: Jeni Stallings
Credit: Jeni Stallings
“When I was growing up, every Sunday, we were made to dress up, put on the pantyhose, the slip, the painful shoes.”
“I love the South, but not how it expects us to be sweet and quiet. Some of my figures don’t have mouths if you look closely,” says Stallings. “I feel like I have always been a feminist since I was a girl.”
The natural world is also an ongoing source of inspiration, but even more so during the pandemic. Stallings’ landscapes sprout pastel mushrooms and strange underwater corals and doubling is a common motif: twinned nautilus shells, doppelganger seahorses. It’s the strange beauty and symmetry of nature reminiscent of German illustrator Ernst Haeckel.
Credit: Jeni Stallings
Credit: Jeni Stallings
“Last year I spent a lot of time in my backyard and started getting into mushrooms when I realized we had so many different kinds growing in our yard and how cool that was.”
“I’m inspired by my own environment,” she says, of works like “Hope” of a swim-capped woman sitting in an aboveground pool surrounded by sailboats. Like much of the artist’s work, “Hope” comes out of Stallings’ own experience channeling her COVID-era anxiety into a restful pastime. “I would go out there every day and just float. I could hear my own heart beating, I could hear my breath. I could look at the sky and the clouds above me and know that I was gonna make it through this,” she says.
“That was my meditation.”
Like all of us, Stallings is also just anxious to get out into the world after a year and a half of isolation. “I really feel I’ve been closed off from the world and I do want to engage with people.”
EVENT PREVIEW
Jeni Stallings: Open Studio Event
10 a.m.3 p.m. Oct. 2; 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Oct. 3. Masks required while indoors. Stallings Studio, 222 Flat Shoals Ave. SE, Atlanta. 404-310-1767, www.jenistallingsart.com.
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