AVA Studio Chat: Rachel and Jim Jordan
Meet Rachel and Jim Jordan!
Rachel Jordan is a painter who attended DePauw University, double majoring in Art and Physics. After moving to Hanover, she started working at CRREL, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. Working there part-time allowed her time to focus on painting. Her stylistic path has been diverse, ranging from abstract, hard-edged, and geometric compositions during graduate school, to geometric landscape paintings, and eventually to large, abstract still lifes with personal associations. During the pandemic, Rachel was able to focus on still lifes and childhood memories while avoiding painting about COVID, thanks to the fact that she was working in her home surrounded by heirlooms. The long hours of work during the pandemic paid off, leading to a newfound clarity, a departure from her pre-Covid work. Her artistic influences include artists with simplified and structured styles, including Renaissance painters like Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca, mid-century artists like deKooning, Guston, Elizabeth Murray, and Leon Kossoff, and early modernists like Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne.
Jim Jordan is a painter and draftsman who studied art with Karl Wolfe in the 1950s and earned both Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees in painting at the University of Iowa. He then went on to study art history, specifically early modern painting at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, there he focused on Paul Klee’s work, which later became the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation. Jim worked as a scholar and professor of art history, teaching at various universities, including Dartmouth College. His art is influenced by modern masters like Picasso, Cézanne, and Max Beckmann, he is as well as an early enthusiasm for Medieval art, resulting in a tension between abstract and recognizable forms.