David Jenowe has been a painter for the last thirty years, holding a bachelor in fine arts from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. The last twenty years he lived in Omaha, Nebraska and he has recently been exploring a combination of oil painting with collage, including very old drawings from his childhood, which have been a useful tool for injecting a bit of a whimsical relief from his otherwise typically haunting work. Inclusion of collage can be credited to his membership in a community of about 60 collage artists from about twenty countries in Global Art Project (GAP), founded by Carl Heyward. His work is best described as "abstract expressionism," since his images are usually barely discernible and hidden in an abstract landscape of color and texture, with the exception of collage which are more readily understood as the images they convey. He is drawn to the surreal, phantasmagoric, and often ghostly effects that he pulls from a richly textured background, always exploring the contrasts as they arise, whether it’s the contrasts of color, subject matter, positive/negative spaces, or texture. He enjoys creating spaces that are not easily understood, but are aesthetically pleasing, always pushing himself to try new color palettes, subject matter, and techniques of application.
After contributing a skull to the 10dence - Get Out of Your Skull exhibition, I realized that having a human skull as my “canvas” was a great launching pad into contemplating that which is repugnant and morbid as well as enlightening and dare I say, even beautiful. As a painter, I learned a lot from that project, not only from the purely technical perspective of working on a three-dimensional surface with papier Mache and embedded found objects, but also simply as a human facing the reality of death, the decaying of flesh and getting down to the bare bones of existence, pardon the pun.
