The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Jeanette Fintz creates soft, atmospheric paintings with the sharpness of geometry and air of transparency. She creates delicacy and beauty with bold lines and quiet shapes. She suggests the intangibility of memory, time, and felt landscape through a contrast of crisp lines and metaphoric shapes. Jeanette Fintz’s paintings develop from layers of process, of adding and removing, of overlaying the intuitive upon a kind of algorithmic grid, of combining the painterliness of paint and the precision of digital drawing. Coming out of landscape painting, with a love of color, light and form, Jeanette has found her way, via Turkish Islamic pattern and Gaudi mosaic grids, to abstraction, an abstraction that allows her to experiment with the construction of the design, and the integration of meaning and perceived experiences. For instance, motifs suggest reflections on windows and the natural world beyond, the sensation of emotional instability, or the symbol of shape – her circles and triangles have evolved from her early work, where these forms referred to the female body. She begins by drawing complex grid structures on multiple sheets of translucent vellum, and through overlapping and rotating the vellum sheets, finds an unpredictable image with which to begin painting. Then, alternating between painted improvisation and a more conscious series of shape and line iterations using Adobe Illustrator, she eventually arrives at the final image. At 68 Prince Gallery in Kingston, until August 17, are large paintings, often collaged with canvas and linen whose layered dimensionality adds to a spatial illusion, and small, tile-like paintings with clear nods to the Islamic art that she loves. This Saturday at 4pm, Jeanette also will discuss her art with writer/artist Stephen Westfall.