Jennifer Bartlett - Painter

In the early 80s, while working on my arts degree, I became transfixed by the art of Jennifer Bartlett when her first series of paintings called "In the Garden" were featured in an arts magazine. The fact that I liked her work greatly surprised me, because I didn't really like contemporary art. My attitude towards contemporary art has always been, "I'm living it. Why do I need to look at it? Why remind me of what I already know?"

Anyway, I haven't even thought about Jennifer Bartlett for years, but with renewed interest discovered that one of her recent exhibits involves painting images of maps, and that she actually started out as a map maker. There is something in her work that represents some kind of 'first principles' of perception and cognition. Something fundamental about how humans represent and know about their world. Something timeless.

In the words of critic Maurice Berger, Bartlett’s art “juxtaposes the raw and the cooked, examining the way the world is filtered through the human mind and is encoded into cultural conventions or sign systems.”