Vitae Field - Float II

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Jacquelyn Stephens is an abstract artist who creates large uplifting paintings that explore microscopic sea-life and coastal topography.
She over-enlarges and abstracts miniscule life forms and patterns onto the canvas and paints in many layers using glazing techniques to heighten the luminosity and ephemeral beauty of these otherworldly scenes.
The finished paintings have a unique nuance and glow that is at once captivating, ethereal, mysterious and meditative.
Ultimately Jacquelyn's paintings are about connecting to our sense of awe and wonder at nature and the miraculous building blocks of life. The hope is that the paintings trigger a beautiful uplifting and contemplative experience for the viewer. An experience that also reminds us of the beauty in, and of our important relationship to, the fragile natural world.

Jacquelyn is based in Melbourne and has been painting for over 25 years since being awarded a Bachelor of Fine Art Majoring in Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Over the years she has had several successful solo and group exhibitions in commercial galleries and artists run spaces. Her paintings can be seen in many media publications and are held in private collections worldwide and recently appeared on the popular TV renovation shows 'The Block', ‘Healthy Homes Australia’ and ‘Love it Or List It’. Many of the key themes in her work have been informed by her interest in water, science, nature, the environment and the world of medicine (especially following a brush with death from a mysterious brain tumour in 1997, the cellular origin of which was never discovered).

More recently it has become important for Jacquelyn to make paintings that talk about the current wellness of our oceans and waterways. She glues on fragments of tiny plastic, sourced from years of beach combing, onto her paintings. Sometimes, she uses the plastic, moulded and faded by the sea, as a formal colour device and sometimes as an invisible trace, embedded into the surface. It’s a win, win for the environment. She collects this horrible stuff so it does less harm and it is safely encased in a painting where it stays forever. Either way it is the notion of the plastic being there (visible or not) that is important to her and those that care.

MORE IF YOU WANT!
‘I am interested in making paintings with verve that breathe with an uplifting energy for those viewing them. I am totally inspired and fascinated by natures life forces with its contrasts of order and chaos, but especially in the patterns created by nature, particularly microscopic worlds, aquatic life and the infinite beauty and wonder within the natural world. Having grown up on the cliffs of Bass Strait I am also deeply inspired by the life giving waters of the sea. The power of a crashing wave, vast horizon lines, submerged views of light or miniscule single cell algae, these universes are forever influencing the pictorial spaces in what I do’.
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The subject of Jacquelyn Stephens’s paintings is an exploration into the sublime beauty of the minuscule in nature. She celebrates the life forces, lumiescence and colour energies inherent in all things microscopic, sub-atomic and aquatic. Having grown up on the cliffs of Flinders, staring across the horizon of Bass Strait, she is also deeply inspired by the life giving waters of the sea. The power of a crashing wave, vast horizon lines, bioluminescent organisms or miniscule single cell algae, these universes inspire and influence the pictorial spaces and forms in her paintings.
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Note: You can view Jacquelyn's Bluethumb Art pieces before purchase at her studio via appointment all year round.
Please message Jacquelyn via Bluethumb if you are wanting a studio visit.

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EVEN A BIT MORE FROM THE ARTIST if you would like to read on:
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MY Great TURNING POINT in my Artistic journey and life. As I have always been interested in the human body as a place for contemplation and a space for creation when I ran into some tragedy following completing my BFA, my art took a strange but obvious turn. Well this actually turned out to be my big ‘turning point’ as an artist, but a nasty ailment none-the-less. I was struck down with a life threatening illness that not only put me out of action for a year or so but also affected my eyesight, not great thing for a visual artist. In retrospect, I was really really ill.
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During this time, as happens; I fell into depression. It was at this point that my art really became the only thing that kept me going. It was my only place of joy. The only space I could escape my illness, forget, and be something and somewhere other.
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It was also about now that thoughts about life and death and my own mortality came together to question me and say ‘listen this is it, this is YOUR LIFE…what do you really want to do with it? What is your path?’. My answer was obvious and I have never looked back even through the toughest of times, I am still following my journey…AND... As well as my art being my saviour in my life death situation, the illness became part of my subject, not in a macabre way but kind of mysteriously joyful way. You see the cells of the tumour I had growing in my head could never ever be identified as a common growth formation, it was nothing the professionals had ever seen before. The final diagnosis from my entourage of Specialists was something along the lines of ‘a tumorous mass of unidentifiable origin’! And that my friends is 20th century medical science for you. I continue to be fascinated with the idea of those shadowy tiny cells of ‘unknown origin’ and my following journey into the microscopic and the mysterious building blocks of life. How these cells, atoms, particles beneath the surface of everything we see, are in motion and energized and doing stuff we may never understand, colours we can only imagine, energies that are beyond gravity and mathematics but holding the very fabric of life together. Isn’t that amazing. I find it awe-inspiring. Hence my continued journey into a ‘sublime of the small’ and ‘what lies beneath’.
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