“This little outpost is a diamond in the rough. Tucked away on a residential street in Watertown, it regularly hosts work by a range of artists, mainstream to modern. The current show “jasmine chen: bodywork + practice” is a lalapalooza of style and content.
Owner Ellen Wineberg says Chen was born in China, has been steeped in creating art since she was 2 years old, graduated from Harvard then Brandeis with a degree in economics. She has been demonstrating her technique at StorefrontArtProjects using traditional Chinese brushes and ink pots. Channeling her inner child, she connects with her muse of the moment, has painted using strands of her hair and pressed lipsticked lips together against paper to make small prints that remind me of Marilyn Monroe blowing kisses with her pouty lips. Oh, and made a print by pounding her inked shoe on wet paper.
Her most striking ink wash paintings gain power from simplicity and technique by using traditional Chinese brushes and ink. Subtle gradations from shades of black and gray display an uncanny depth. Examining the prints on the walls and lying on the storefront windowsill feels like a form of walking meditation. In these tumultuous times, a visit to Storefront’s Jasmine Chen exhibit inspires a deep cleansing breath.
Watching Jasmine Chen paint subjects as she sits at a tiny desk in the compact showroom is painterly ballet in motion, her eyes lifting to capture nuances of form that translate to her perception of what’s underneath what she sees then a deft kinetic response using every angle of her paint brush, dainty dots to suggest an eye, broad strokes to fill in shapes of bodies. and a small cotton cloth to blot or expand the still watery ink for the effect she wants.
That Chen carries this off with such calm aplomb is a marvel to witness.
-Paul Tamburello, blogger and art and social commentator (October 2023)
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“Jasmine’s large format oil painting, “Why Is Your Big Head So Hard?” measures 40” by 60”. Abstraction fills three quarters of this canvas, with every single imaginable speed of painting and level of finish, so almost this construction and deconstruction of the language of painting. And then this huge range of expression in your brushwork is then recapitulated in these two inverse heads in the upper left: one is peacefully sleeping, and the other is this terrified mask-like face. So it’s this sort of spectrum of human expression that is both figurative in these faces and then rendered in abstraction through brush work. A really energetic, exciting canvas... how much is planned out versus spontaneous, because there is quite a delicate balance between those two things.”
-Sam Adam, Curator and PhD of contemporary art (September 2021)