Jenifer Hammond/Courtesy photo
Q: How long have you lived in the valley and what brought you here?
A: I moved to Vail in 1999 because of a boy. 23 years later I have three children and three grandchildren, all of whom live in the valley. I’ve worked everywhere: in retail in Beaver Creek, for Vail Resorts, for local nonprofits, as a server in Eagle and I owned and operated my own company called I Do Weddings and I was a wedding planner for 20 years.
Q: Where did your passion for art come from?
A: I would say it is both part of how I see and process the world, communicate and how I work with and through emotion, ideas and concepts. Art for me for a long time was event design, creating and holding space for something beautiful and significant to happen, facilitating connection, celebration of relationship and legacy. Now, it is quite a bit more intimate. In my art I am able to externalize strong emotion, play with symbolism, focus and framing, express joy and whimsy.
Q: Describe your style of art.
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A: I paint largely using a palette knife and work with metal leafing and other materials to create conceptual abstracts or abstracted and graphic representations of natural scenes, like aspen trees, or sunlight in the sky or water. I often write original poetry into the piece, sometimes obscured, other times visible.
Q: Who are your favorite artists?
A: I did not have much of an art education when I started this, but have come to wildly love Clyfford Still. We are fortunate to have access to much of his life’s work in his museum in Denver.
Q: Tell us about one of your favorite pieces that you’ve worked on.
A: I began by painting contemporary and almost two-dimensional impressions of aspen trees, just a cross section, panoramic with no treetops and no horizon. I’ve explored that image more than 200 times. I started pouring and throwing paint or repeating patterns and textures in more abstracted expressions of trees and recently have been playing with monochromatic pieces, using simple and limited color palettes to see what kind of image I can make using texture. I made a six-foot-tall painting that was almost entirely white with a little bit of gold leaf and it still had notes of the forest in it, all the texture and depth, light pouring in from the top corner. I’m proud to have it in a private collection in a home in Vail. My most recent piece is a 10-foot-by-4-foot-tall blue, textured piece. It’s not yet stretched or framed and can be viewed in either my gallery or at the Beaver Creek Art Festival Aug. 2-4.
Q: Who has helped you along the way? Who/what inspires you?
A: Oh, so many helpers in this mountain community. Wendy Satsky (former art teacher at Minturn Middle School), Anne Dunlevie and Lynn Gottlieb were my core group of painting friends and are responsible for me ever picking up a paintbrush. Inspiration is all around me, it’s in the color, texture and light in the mountains, in the sun dappled aspen grove, it’s in the curve of my child’s cheek when they smile, in the bee as it bobs along in my garden in the spring, in the draping fabric of a snow ribbon on a fence, it’s in my lover’s hand, in the rock studded river; inspiration is the easy part.
Q: If you weren’t an artist, what would you be doing?
A: Event production
Q: What do you hope people take away from your work?
A: I hope they’re drawn to it, moved by it, interested in it.
Q: Where is your work shown (a local gallery) or how/where can people view it?
A: I own The Grove Studio Gallery in Minturn. It’s in the Meadow Mountain Business Park just before you enter town, across from Vail Mountain Coffee and Tea Company. I exhibit at art festivals across the country, in Florida, Washington, D.C., Chicago and all over Colorado including Beaver Creek and Vail. I can be found online at JeniferHammond.com or on social as Jenifer_Hammond_Art.
Q: Anything else we should have asked, anything else you’d like to share?
A: Art is a practice. I was fortunate to be asked to lead a class once and I realized my perspective wasn’t one about technical aspects of painting, that it wasn’t end-product focused at all. It was instead, an invitation to get curious about materials, to engage in the process, to explore what happens when you do x, y, z and an opportunity to give oneself permission to make a mess, to create something destined for the trash, to really play with the more visceral side of creating something and perhaps in the end you have something you’d like to keep or display and perhaps you don’t, you walk away having spent the time at play. Practicing art in itself has value.
