Words as Visual Elements

Jeanette Staley has always been motivated by social issues, so it's no surprise that when she left social work to pursue a career as a fine artist, she focused on ideas as much as technique. Today, the Vermont artist describes her paintings as "multilayered," in which she combines traditional still-life and landscape painting techniques with a more contemporary blend of collaged paper, photographs, and handwritten text to create personally meaningful images.

Staley prefers to work intuitively and begins a painting by affixing paper to stretched canvas with an acrylic gel medium. "I work on canvas stretched over a thick two-inch frame because I also like to paint the edges," she says. "When I start I often have no idea where the painting will end up, whether it will be a landscape or a still life." After Staley covers the canvas with collaged papers, she sets it aside to dry. Later, she will often add more layers of collaged paper, and a finished work may have more than five separate layers of collage material, affixed by gel medium.

As Staley pastes, working up the layers of a collage, she allows the interaction of text and images to guide her toward a theme. The artist doesn't use preliminary sketches or color studies, preferring instead to allow the first step of her painting to be a brainstorming session. "At a certain point I begin to get focused on where I'm going with the painting," she explains. "An issue will kick in, and I will start to deliberately choose images and text that fit my idea."

When she is happy with her base of collaged papers and photographs, Staley uses acrylics to paint the entire canvas dark brown. "I mix raw umber with ultramarine blue to make a gray," she says. "In some paintings I will use a burnt umber, if I want the base to be a little redder. This is brushed over the entire canvas. Then I go in with a clean cloth and wipe off a lot of the paint. Areas with collage are lightened so that I can see the text or image, and other areas are darkened where the paint collects from the wiping."

When working on a painting that includes a still life, Staley tapes off a smaller rectangle in the center of the canvas using Scotch Removable Magic Tape. "Once the rectangle is taped, I apply a thick acrylic base coat of white or hot pink," Staley says, describing the technique used to create Resolution 2263. "Next, I set up my still life and move a spotlight around until I like the lighting. Then I spend time drawing and redrawing, measuring and remeasuring, especially with glassware, because I want it to look realistic."

The artist uses a heavy coat of paint for the beginning layers, "because I'm trying to cover the background texture of the collage," she explains. "If there is too much texture, I sand it down a bit." Staley then works from the general to the specific, using a drybrush technique to capture the textures of the fruit or the subtleties of the shadows. For detail work she uses a small sable brush. Staley does not, however, adhere to any particular brand of paint or brush, preferring instead to browse an art store for the
colors and materials that catch her eye.

"The final stage of Resolution 2263 was to add the text," Staley continues. "I added the script with a wax-based colored pencil in a couple of pale blues. Much of the text I use comes from Dante's Divine Comedy and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Classics interest me because they often talk about the same things we're talking about today. Indeed, we're still struggling with the same issues, and often from the exact same point of view."

For Staley, text in a painting is another form of texture, which can yield an additional layer of interest to a work. "Whenever I see a painting with text in it, I want to read it, figure out who wrote it, and why," Staley says. "I like adding text to my paintings because I believe I can represent issues that are more complex than those I would be able to represent with images alone. My goal is not to present an issue and say it should be this way or that way. I want my viewers to engage in a dialogue with me, and my work is how I start that dialogue."

Although Staley admits that many viewers are often attracted to a painting by its still life or landscape, she is confident that they eventually discover the layers of her collage. She avoids categorizing her work, saying, "My paintings can be both realistic and abstract. Most of my paintings are personal, and I can find a self-portrait in all of them. The best one-line definition I came up with is that my paintings are social-political commentaries."

Other surprises are in store for the studious viewer. Pointing to the upper-right-hand corner of Resolution 2263, Staley explains, "This image of a woman related to an article I read about a woman from the Middle East who was in Boston trying to get political amnesty. If she returned to Egypt, her husband was evidently going to kill her. That was what set me off and prompted me to do this painting."

The ideas that engage Staley incubate in her thoughts for some time before taking form on canvas. "I continually go through The New York Times, read books, skim the internet, listen to NPR, and keep up with current events. Once I have an idea, I do a lot of research and begin to collect relevant collage material. When I did the painting Fairy Tales I was thinking about fairy tales in general, and how my daughter would want to dress like a princess but then go out to play in the mud and catch frogs. I was thinking about what happens to girls, and, at the same time, I was concerned about single mothers in the United States. So, I began to collect free dating booklets from local stores that had pages of advertisements for singles. I'm sure people thought I was nuts when I'd go to the store to fondle the pears and take the dating magazines, but I was painting pears and the magazine pages were great for collage."

A library of collage materials sits in Staley's house. "I keep everything from newspaper articles to wallpaper, obituaries to papers with interesting textures. Piles of boxes sit on the floor. One may be for maps, another for old book pages. I throw newer, unorganized materials into big bins, and anytime I read an article that interests me, I rip it out."

The objects used in her still lifes are collected in a manner much like the collage paper. Staley frequents flea markets and antique fairs to find perfect glassware items. Friends are often asked to temporarily part with an object that catches Staley's eye, so she can use it in a still life.

Staley was working full time in social services, going to school, and raising her young children when she changed the direction of her life. She was involved in art workshops and was painting landscapes and portraits of her children, and decided that her life needed to be different. "I wanted to be there when my children arrived home from school," she explains, "so I opened up the Center for Artistic Expression in my hometown of Hudson, Massachusetts." The center held classes, exhibited the work of local artists, ran a summer camp for children, and brought in visiting artists to present workshops.

During one of those workshops Staley discovered collage. "Jim Eng, a Boston-based collage artist, came as a visiting artist," she explains. "Although it was a short workshop, I was totally blown away by what he was doing. Previously I had been struggling with painting and trying to find a way to paint that felt meaningful to me. The collage felt completely right." Today Staley finds it interesting that a brief workshop had such an effect on her life. "Eng said that to be a good artist, you have to paint every day," she adds, "and that's what I've done ever since."

Over the 10 years that Staley headed the Center for Artistic Expression, she watched living expenses in the Boston suburbs rise dramatically. Eventually, she decided to relocate to Westminster, Vermont, a small town that gave her more "peace and space." She describes Vermont as a "dramatic" place to live, with its "dramatic weather and mountains." "Paying attention to that drama," Staley notes, "caused me to pay more attention to the drama of the painting, too."

Staley is a member of the Southern Vermont Arts Center, the Cambridge Art Association, the Concord Art Association, and the Women's Caucus for Art. Her work can be seen at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, in Manchester; the Renjeau Gallery, in Concord, Massachusetts; and at Hudson Art and Framing, in Hudson, Massachusetts. More of the artist's work may be viewed at www.jeanettestaley.com.