Jan Rowland & Danielle Bensky
Drifting with Nature
October 5 - November 3, 2024
The Popcorn Gallery presents Drifting with Nature, a two-person exhibition by artists Jan Rowland and Danielle Bensky. In this exhibition, viewers will experience how profoundly the artists have been inspired by nature over the course of many years of making art.
Rowland and Bensky are deeply committed to bringing art to the public through interesting and challenging interpretations of the world around us. Through seeing, recording, and transforming nature, they create visual representations that are unique to each artist.
“We have lived American lives through the prism of our diverse cultural backgrounds from our native France and Australia,” said the artists. “We realize that Glen Echo Park is often described as a “people’s park,” and we revel in establishing contact with the richest of its resources, its people.”
About the artists
Australian born, Jan Rowland is primarily a painter now but was formerly a ceramicist. Rowland earned her BFA from Newcastle School of Art and Newcastle University (Australia) then continued with ceramic studies for two years at Canberra School of Art. She taught high school students for 12 years before marrying a U.S. Foreign Service Officer and taking off around the world, leaving her potter's wheel in Australia. After arriving in the DC area in 2000, Rowland spent time working and doing life drawing locally. She began to paint in 2009. She received awards in regional juried art shows and has paintings in many private collections. She was a resident artist at Glen Echo Park for three years (2019-21) Currently, Rowland works as a Curator at Friendship Heights Village Center (2024) and also as an artist at City Line studios (2022-24) in Friendship Heights.
Danielle Bensky’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as La Maison Francaise of the French Embassy, Georgetown University, Katzen Art Center, Klutznick Museum, Sumner Museum, Susan Conway Gallery, The Arts Club, Strathmore Arts Center, National Institutes Salon d’Automne, Grand Palais, UNESCO, Galerie Maillet, Galerie Arte Viva, among others. Bensky has received public sculpture commissions at American Chemical Society (ACS), Georgetown University: Lauinger Library, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH). Her work can be found in private collections in Chile, England, France, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Scotland, Switzerland and the United States.
Artist Statement (Jan Rowland)
“Nature has always been a source of inspiration for me. The colors, the shapes, the beauty and the ease of gaining esoteric comfort from the eternal existence of nature has sustained me. For the past two years, I have been focusing on the world of Kenilworth Gardens in DC with emphasis on the lotus and other water plants. Within the garden's environs can be seen the contradiction of exquisite flowers and leaves emerging from dark, muddy, uninviting waters with the energy-sapping heat and humidity guaranteeing the interplay of these opposites. From beauty to the unsightly, from pleasure to discomfort and order to disorder, the opposites are always present at the gardens.
With my art, reality emerges from the frame of a painting. Inside the frame is the play of color, the slow movement of shapes creating an oblique reference to nature. My artwork involves multiple, ever-shifting perspectives: areas that generate an imaginative yet real experience of the natural world. My work navigates between the world of dreams and that of reality. However, it is not surprising that most creative people are vague and dreamy, for to be creative in writing or painting or music you have to navigate between the real and imaginative realms. It is in imagination that creativity is found. Or, as expressed by Wassily Kandinsky, ‘painting should grow out of .... an internal necessity’ and a painting should ‘be the inner voice of an artist.’ Thus my paintings are a language and a direct communication in which I can disclose the joys and torments of an inner dialogue within my thoughts.”
Artist Statement (Danielle Bensky)
“Why do I paint? What am I trying to achieve? I can truthfully say that painting is my very personal way of passing along the silent language of reality as I perceive, encounter, and experience it.
My work is not at all engendered by concepts, which is why I have fondness for the Surrealists. Their founding poet, Andre Breton, speaking of his own process, said “words came knocking” at his window pane as he was writing. By analogy, this is what happens to me in my studio: on days when I’m lucky, forms, themes and colors come knocking or dancing on my skylight, demanding to be admitted and welcomed.
This is why I am so fond of symbiosis and metamorphosis, in which an external element - notably trees - will be transmuted by a poetic encounter with a female spirit-figure, no doubt some secret persona deep in my psyche yearning for expression. The result will be a movement toward suggestions of the symbolic, not as initial intention but by happenstance, an unexpected encounter somewhere on the road less traveled.
Like the unfurling of a story, yes, a narrative symbolism in which we the viewers become narrators setting in motion our own memories and imagination.”
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