Interview with Artist: Jeni Bate

by Galina Kovshilovsky

Why do you do what you do?

My signature method – refracturing – came about as three mistakes and a theft. Painting birds on palm bark looked good, but they were unhangable. Cutting them to fit shadow boxes didn’t look good. I threw away the birds and decided to use the leftover
shadow boxes with a watercolor background and reverse glass acrylic foreground. I cropped the third one incorrectly and end up cutting it up and rearranging it. Knowing that it’s different from other collage, I needed to come up with another word, and ended up stealing it from quilters who saw my work and likened our methods.

What’s is your background?

I was pushed into academics as a child for reasons too diverse to talk about quickly. Science and languages were a forte, and literature studies included poetry, but an
earlier epiphany took me into the computer world for over 30 years.

What art do you most identify with?

Sky and waterscapes, abstracts, birds! Anything that doesn’t laud mankind. I write a monthly newsletter to my followers and one month decided to look at what kind of art I collected. I went round the house and everything I’d bought was bird related.

What work do you most enjoying doing?

Things that make the viewer think about their place in the universe. Paintings and poems (poems written for and painted into the paintings) that make me stand back after and think ‘Holy cow, I*** did that?’.

What’s your strongest memory of your childhood?

There are so many bad ones, it’s hard to pick. Perhaps the good one, the light at the
end of childhood’s tunnel was my determination to become or achieve something useful. In high school, while I wasn’t a popular student, one of the girls said out of the blue that I was the most likely in the class to become famous. Everyone in the room agreed and I realized that my ability wasn’t invisible.

Can you describe a real-life situation that inspired you?

At the Westlake Village Art Guild, when I was living in Thousand Oaks, we had monthly speakers. One of them was Sadegh Aref. He described a big art show he attended which was judged and he watched as the judges came down the line, looked in each
booth, discussed, wrote down and went on. When they came to his booth they barely glanced and moved on. He was so astounded that later he had to ask them why. Their answer was that his work (at that time) was not unique. So he vowed to do something unique, to find his voice. Every time someone looks and my work and say they’ve never seen anything like it, I think of the lesson that he passed on.

Why art?

I had been taking a photography class and couldn’t take my mind of a particular photograph. I didn’t want to be limited by what could be achieved with photography. It just kept going through my mind, ‘Now you have to PAINT!’ About 10 years ago a slide of me a child about 4 years old resurfaced – I had been painting at my little easel and the painting I had completed was a sky. The photograph triggered the memory that all
my childhood paintings looked that way, a massive sky with tiny mountains at the bottom: the passion to create skyscapes had been with me from the start. I felt that it wasn’t so much me choosing skyscapes as a subject, but that skyscapes chose me. The desire to write poetry had occurred around the same time but had always been nurtured by culture and opportunity. Melding them was natural. Both had always been something I needed to do in this life.

What is artistic outlook on life?

To not be limited to seeing things that are, but that might be or that were or that never
could be, to always expand yourself by learning and others by offering them the lesson.

What makes you angry?

When people call my work ‘whimsical’. It seems like they think it is frivolous.

What is your dream project?

To have the kind of opportunities that mean I have reason to paint bigger paintings, specifically for public art projects. But of the course there’s the catch 22 of not getting the work because you don’t have the experience and the existing larger examples.

What is your favorite or the most inspirational place in the world?

My home. ‘Dawn off my back porch’ – looking across the Salton Sea is the start point of
so many paintings.

What is your goal?

To create things – art, poetry, whatever that makes people think about their place in the universe, how petty it is, how fragile the body, how connected we are to everything and how immortal are our souls. I want to create art that says: Stop. Forget. Remember.