MISSION STATEMENT

*To encourage others to practice "art filled living"

*To restore hope to the blocked and struggling artists

*To build confidence, courage, and dreams through art

*To strengthen and energize existing artistic passions

*To offer a form of "preventative medicine" through the
formation of healthy passions

*To provide a center for artists to congregate



The jenniferharwellart staff welcomes your regular and frequent visits to the
studio/gallery in SOHO SQUARE.

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jenniferharwellart studio/gallery | 1830 29th Ave S Suite 130 | SOHO Square | Homewood | AL | 35209
jenniferharwellart is a working studio/gallery in the heart of downtown Homewood in
SOHO SQUARE. The Gallery & Website represent over 80 local, regional, and
international artists.  Please take time to click on the above links to view the art as
well as a glimpse inside the Gallery during the popular adult art classes.



Oregon-raised Jennifer Harwell, a brazenly self-taught painter, emerged on an
unlikely art scene in Birmingham, Alabama in 2006, at age 49, after shunning an
academic art education or following the path of her artist brother, sculptor Steven
Eichenberger (studiotenxiii Gallery, Lake Oswego, Ore.) to become a nurse.

An Iowan, Harwell moved to Newberg, Ore., with her family when she was eight.
She reserved for her later career impressions of a picture-book 1960s upbringing
by a family of artisans -- her father, a printer and her grandmother, a seamstress
-- against a spectacular landscape that was to become Oregon wine country.  

"Those impressions, as I rode endlessly on my bike as a child, or played with fabric
from my grandmother's scrap box, left a grand life stamp," Harwell said.  

Northwest

That stamp re-emerged in 2007 and 2008 in the 10-canvas Northwest Series, a
collection of landscapes carved rapidly in paint from a palette pared to burnt
umber, raw umber, yellow ochre, cobalt turquoise, and white.

Harwell painted so vigorously on Columbia she developed a form of tennis elbow.
The images, however, ask only that the viewer recall, as Harwell does, some bold
line or hue from a Northwest scene without needing to pinpoint it on the map. The
paintings of the Columbia River, Larch, Shasta, Chehalem mountains, Bald Peak
and a Portland nightscape, among others, were dry long before they were named
-- or sometimes even recognized -- as their geographical subjects, Harwell said.  

Angels

Prior to the Northwest series, Harwell produced more than 100 "Angel" canvases
after the first, Life Prevails, emerged when she gashed and then repaired a 60 X
48-inch color block painting. Repaired and then covered with gold paint, the scar
suggested an angel, and more than 100 . Angels tend to be across between an
elegant woman, a nude and a spiritual being.  
Notice the domestic tone in the names, Reconciliation, Inseparable, Family Reunion,
and you'll understand where Harwell's coming from.

The two series represent the styles recognizable as Harwell's own, after two years
of prodigious work and hundreds of canvases in a range of abstract styles and
subjects that "appealed to everyone’s tastes."  
Rapid fire

Harwell perhaps followed a typical path for artists. Showing skill at drawing and
design as a teenager, she instead chose practical, academic career, nursing, until
she had raised her children and found time in later adulthood to develop her
talents. Harwell was not to begin painting until 2006, but within six months had sold
35 of 100 paintings at a solo show. That same year she shut down a gallery at her
home and moved into a 400-square-foot shopfront in Homewood, Alabama, a
work space she intended to use to sell some of the nearly 300 canvases executed
in the previous 18 months.  

By summer 2007, the Birmingham painter -- whose rapid-fire arm stroke produced
a steady supply of finished work and a case of tennis elbow -- opened
Jenniferharwellart.  

The Gallery

There, Harwell and her husband have merged personal taste with a marketing
plan generous to new artists but in an authentic, (if high-end and self-consciously
chic) enclave of shops and cafes called SoHo Square in Birmingham's Homewood
community.

> Generous, because Harwell rejected the gallery world’s routine 50-50
commission and exclusive contract arrangement for a 75-25 plan made feasible by
charging low monthly marketing fee and conducting informal classes.  

Those classes eventually brought blocked military painter Kevin Webster to the
gallery in 2007. Webster, an Alabama painter whose meticulous military and
combat paintings hang at the Pentagon and in private collections of at least two U.
S. Army generals, hadn’t painted in four years. Harwell helped Webster begin
painting again then discovered Webster’s connections to Early American Western
artist Charles Russell, a mentor of Webster’s artist grandfather, a Montanan.
Webster, now painting civilian portraits and exploring Western themes, is
accompanying Harwell on a gallery tour of the west and southwest this spring.  

>Authentic, because living in a loft above the gallery are celebrated artist Raeford
Liles, 80, a native Alabamian whose return after a career in Paris and Manhattan in
which he rendered a series of ballet movement paintings coinciding with his work
at the New York City Ballet in the 1960s.

Some dozen of the remnant of Lile's dance movement painting – executed on
massive canvasses with negative stencil, spray paint and acrylics – are hanging in
Harwell’s gallery. Another dozen have been sold, with the gallery working on plans
for stashes of canvases still rolled up in Lile's loft.

Much of the gallery’s success as a presenter, agent, classroom and working studio
to new art is credited to the business acumen of Harwell’s husband, Donny, who
manages the business after 30 years in retail clothing and real estate.


Today, Harwell sums up her approach to art:

"My painting career was the next step in a succession of experiences that began as
. Once I began painting, I modeled freely on master painters, from Cezanne to
Mark Rothko, and George Bellows, John Sargent, Gary Earnest Smith by copying
and abstracting their work before defining my own style. The heavily textured
surfaces come from my work in textiles and design work with objects that
preceded painting.  

In landscapes, I work from top to bottom in defined, successive blocks of color. My
composition is straightforward -- a canvas divided in three parts and laying down
paint from top to bottom as rapidly as possible, splicing and sculpting shapes into
the paint with the palette knife. Each surface is heavily textured, with surprising
juxtapositions of color. I believe composition, perspective and color balance are
instinctive, and unplanned.  

Artists who most influenced my approach are Southwest painter Angus McPherson
and Alabama Artist Roger Brown. I've adopted the mantra of Brown, who was
admonished by mentor Ray Yoshida at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago to
paint "only what he knew." For me, that knowing is only available when I start to
paint, and then I go into that place and paint vigorously. I do not require of my
students or myself to sketch what I’m going to paint beforehand.

I paint from the hip."
About Jennifer Harwell