Jenny Phillips

Jenny Phillips Description

Jenny Phillips is a multimedia artist based in San Francisco, CA. With a background in printmaking, Jenny spent her formative years at the Brooklyn Academy of Music working as a graphic designer. The combination of theater, dance, and music that Jenny witnessed at BAM continues to inform her work today, both in the moods she creates and in the gestures and rhythms she employs. 
With aims to convey feeling or to evoke essence, her work incorporates paper, thread, wax, natural pigments, paper mâché, inks, watercolor and washes, and found objects. Her expressive paintings and sculptures have been exhibited throughout California and far beyond. In addition to private collections, her work can be seen at The Museum of Encaustic Art in Santa Fe, Stanford Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California Pacific Medical Center (Van Ness) in San Francisco, Sunrise Hospital Medical Center in Las Vegas, and One Medical in Los Angeles. Her most recent public commission is a series of 10 murals at Hotel Zoe near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

Jenny Phillips Statement

I work from feeling rather than ideology. Inspired by the ordinary and the everyday, I respond to the personal moments in my environment, discovering beauty in expected and the unexpected, gleaning its essence from the places and objects I encounter. 

Distilling images into their simplest form is my ultimate goal. Not much is often enough. I strive to absorb the tempo of the everyday, whether from the meter of my step, the rhythm of the seasons, or the sense of the fleeting and tenuous beauty that surrounds us. It is these subliminal emotions, these moments in time, that I strive to capture in my work. 

My multidisciplinary approach relies on a variety of materials such as paper, thread, wax, natural pigments, papier mâché, inks, watercolor and washes, and found objects. One piece can include many forms of inspiration—netted fruit bags, feathers, X-acto blades, grass, looms, whisks, twigs, shadows, fog and fire, or scraps of wire to name a few. Even discarded remnants become a source of inspiration: I use and reuse almost all of any one material in the making process. Painted paper photographed for one series can become a mural, then used in an encaustic piece, or sewn onto something else for documenting. 

I’m trying to balance simplicity of expression with spontaneity of gesture to evoke the essence of the everyday. My work documents the places and times when the ordinary takes us by surprise.