| Bartlett, Jennifer (1941- ) American artist, known for her representations of water, gardens, and swimmers, which are created and shown in series. She often depicts the same subjects in her works, varying only the scale, medium, and artistic style from one work to the next. Bartlett grew up in Long Beach, California, and attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where she received a B.A. degree in 1963. She then studied at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and graduated in 1965 with an M.F.A (master of fine arts) degree. In 1968 Bartlett began creating works on grids of steel plates, each of them 0.3 m (12 in) square and coated in white baked enamel. One such work is Rhapsody (1976, private collection), regarded as the first work of Bartlett's mature period. It consists of a series of vividly colored landscape images painted in various styles on 988 of these steel plates, which are affixed to the wall. In her paintings from the late 1970s, Bartlett continued to explore a variety of styles, ranging from mechanistic patterns of dots to more personal and expressive brushwork. Bartlett spent the winter of 1979 to 1980 in a villa in Nice, France, a sojourn that inspired a series of about 200 drawings and paintings of the garden outside her studio, which are known collectively as In the Garden. In this series, Bartlett not only varies the format, medium, and style of each work, but also depicts the scene at different times of day. In this way Bartlett resembles French impressionist artist Claude Monet who, in series such as Haystacks (1891) painted numerous versions of the same view of a subject, in a systematic study of the various effects of light and atmosphere. Since 1985, Bartlett's works have included three-dimensional sculptural forms which she shows in combination with painted images. |
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