As a child Margaret Jean, who would become an artist, recorded the summer sun’s furthest reach in chalk on the porch of her home. Forgotten for years, such lessons sparked her 1993-94 paintings, of winter shadows across the snow, “Shadows from a Single Tree.” Fifteen years later summer shadows and changing light compelled Jean to begin recording those shadows on index cards with yellow markers and pencil. In 2016 she prepared nine canvases for the series of paintings, “The Hours of Summer.” To these paintings of summer light, she brought a sense of space and three-dimensional form: space as the field of vision becomes a theatre in which to enact the drama of changing shadows and form in the sculptural treatment of tree or foreground fence.
Both of these landscape groups are New England paintings and serve as bookends for the years between them when the artist traveled every year to the American southwest, painting, drawing, photographing and writing. Jean speaks of a renewed awareness of space as her paintings of rivers and canyons show depth and distance as one whole space. Here, in her paintings of the southwest, the idea of a window into a scene emerges: the artist begins the drawings with the desert plants at her feet and when it is finished it will include the distant horizon.
Both of these landscape groups are New England paintings and serve as bookends for the years between them when the artist traveled every year to the American southwest, painting, drawing, photographing and writing. Jean speaks of a renewed awareness of space as her paintings of rivers and canyons show depth and distance as one whole space. Here, in her paintings of the southwest, the idea of a window into a scene emerges: the artist begins the drawings with the desert plants at her feet and when it is finished it will include the distant horizon.
The Hour of Summer 1, 20"x 18", paint on canvas
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