Random acts bring new art to life
The "accidentalist" art of Jennifer Kincaid

By John Tierney

Jennifer Kincaid is an artist who has taken the visual experience to new frontiers using a variety of mediums to express light and shadow, including pigments on paper, dyes on fabric and depth in sculpture. Creating wild scenes in the abstract, Kincaid seduces the eye through waves, webs and wupses of color. Indeed she could be described as an "accidentalist," as she admits to throwing around her paint-covered fingers haphazardly once a pleasing color combination is found.

The results are shocking. Layer upon layer of wispy violet blended with chalk-white leap from the foreground of one painting, while in the same tone a dancing figure whirls in its center. Many layers of soft greens and brilliant reds jump about to frame this central vortex.

An organic process

Kincaid has "looked into" the mechanics of rods and cones of the eye and the role they play in the perception of images; indeed they are in restless movement, which explains why static objects can appear to be in motion. Kincaid's work not only excites the eye with its movement, but compels the imagination as well, a phenomenon rooted in the artist's philosophy.

While observing a concrete image such as a tree, the onlooker subconsciously associates that image with his own experience creating a sentiment concerning trees. If the painter utilizes abstract imagery, the onlooker must engage himself directly with what is being viewed, suspending his own assumptions "rooted" in concrete things. From here, an organic process takes place. The observer gradually appreciates the painting based on its own merits, in a mind-wrecking confrontation. Similarly, when two people engage in conversation, they tend to speak of mutual associations. If one brings up an alien subject, the other will probably lose attention or grope for inner identification, and shut new ideas out. However, if the individual continues to listen, he or she will discover something new and worthy of consideration which otherwise may have never gained admission into the private territory of the personal mind.

Order is inherent in chaos

To be learned from Kincaid's work is that chaos possesses an inherent order. As Kincaid explains that, to her, the creative process she engages in is a "physical activity with an aesthetic feeling," her hand "swooshes" about the surface of a completed piece for its own description of the experience. At once the listener is impressed by the duality inherent in the recklessness of the process and the order of the product.

Her inspiration spontaneously arising out of human feeling, she empties that within her which is "full of the day," allowing it to flow assisted onto awaiting surface -- the concerns of all satisfied and given expression and its own proprietary place.

She grabs a clean sheet a paper and a supply of color, and the process erupts of its own accord; two worlds collide, chaos here and now. But because the hand with the eye creates, and the eye from the memory begins, Kincaid's psyche is rendered by a hand possessed to visual perfection.

In addition to the imagination and education that Kincaid's paintings offer, a therapeutic quality is found. Most people have heard that a mere ten percent of the human brain is used to capacity. Similarly, the potential of the human eye has yet to be fulfilled. To look at abstract forms is indeed an effective exercise to increase the eye's capacity to notice transitions in color, form and dimension, expanding its scope and reach as the body's primary perceptual sense.

When an artist can produce a style of presentation unhampered by norms and convention, a chord is struck in the imagination, and the desire to create is kindled. If art is judged on its capacity to inspire more art, Jennifer Kincaid's eccentric visual adventures rank near the top.