Termite TV - Life Stories

Hi, I'm Jennifer S. And.. I live in Oklahoma. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. And I was born in Dallas, Texas in 1960. And my father left my family when I was three, so my mom moved us back to Oklahoma where she was from. And I grew up here, all my life. And I wanted to be a dancer. And when I went to O.U. when I was eighteen my father told me he wouldn't pay for my school if I was a dancer, that I needed a real job. And so I decided to just wait tables and dance anyways. And then I ended up in the University of Utah dancing and then I broke my tailbone and decided that I needed another creative outlet in my life. So I kind of started drawing and painting but never took it seriously. Then I got married and I had a son who's twelve now. And then I tried to have another baby and I lost that baby and when I lost that baby I realized that I really did want to paint so I started painting seriously. And I was living in n.c at the time and my husband was doing a residency in medicine. So we moved to Los Angeles for him to do a fellowship and I started painting at art center in Pasadena. And I was there for two years. And then I got pregnant with my daughter and we moved back to Oklahoma where we both grew up and our families were so our kids would have cousins to play with and stuff and I'm completely frustrated as an artist here in OK, it's kind of a wasteland for artists. It's very hard to stay on top of the contemporary art world in Oklahoma. And, but I'm finishing my BFA in painting at the UNiversity of Oklahoma and I'll graduate this summer. And I would like to do graduate work in painting and in sculpture but I'm not sure where, ya know. There's not very many opportunities for grad school here in my field. But I like Oklahoma, I like being back on the prairie. And when I lived in Los Angeles when I came back to Oklahoma every time I'd fly in I'd roll down the windows and what I really like best about being bak in Oklahoma is you can smell the dirt. And you can't, you never smell that in Los Angeles. That was one of the things that just kind of, it brings me back to Oklahoma is that smell of the dirt and that it's always in the sky and in your clothes and in the water and everything. And I like the bog open skies here. When I lived in North Carolina there's pine trees all over the place and you could never, I used to get lost all the time because you could never have a sense of where you were going because you were always in this forest. And when I came back to Oklahoma it was nice to have that wide open space again out on the plain. And I think if I moved back to Los Angeles or to North Carolina I would really miss having that sense of openness. It kind of, it makes you feel vulnerable but it's... It's also gives you a sense of freedom also. Kind of like being in the desert, ya know, it's kind of a vulnerable, scary beauty, the openness of the horizon gives you. Is that it? I have one more minute? I still have to talk? What else? I paint in... I guess I could talk about my painting. I paint in, I started out in oils and I do some egg tempera and I recently started working with encaustic which is melted beeswax and pigment. And I do some kind of assemblage sculpture usually dealing with women's issues and motherhood and just kind of a divided self with it, between all those different, trying to juggle all those different things of, ya know, painter, mother, independent woman, ya know, all those things. The thing I like about encaustic is that it crosses all boundaries of drawing and sculpture and painting kind of all mixed together. It has a sculptural quality, but you can print with it you and you can draw into it so i t kind of melds all of my favorite things together on one block of wood. And it's also the oldest painting method around.