{Jackie Tileston}
a world in which the beautiful, absurd, sacred, and mundane coexist
An important part of my process is sitting on my couch sipping tea and staring at the paintings — there is a pretty high contemplation to action ratio.
On a studio day, I usually start painting after lunch and am there off and on until bedtime. Studio time includes a combination of hard work, napping, sipping tea, reading, surfing the web, working again, shuffling bits of paper around, and dancing. I almost always have music going. Just spending time in the studio creates a kind of space, permission, possibility.
I’ve learned that it’s worth being stubborn about protecting my freedom, curiosity, and joy.
I use abstraction as an invitation to be receptive to the unseen, to encourage the viewer towards slowness and away from naming. Abstraction can suspend the viewer in that space of unknowing for just a little longer.
Nothing is left out.
The Sanskrit word chamatkara means something like wonder and aesthetic rapture at the astonishing beauty of the inherent patterns of existence. In Abhinavagupta’s nondual aesthetic theory from the 11th century, the “nine flavors of beauty” (rasas) include the heroic, mind-blowing, emotive, comedic, wrathful, erotic, disgusting, terrifying, and peaceful. Nothing is left out. ~Jackie Tileston
Everything’s included.
Art ◎ Music ◎ Food
Jackie’s Mango Num Num
About Jackie
My paintings investigate the contemporary sublime and states of being. There is a constant flux between atmospheric and graphic, abstract and figurative, quiet and chaotic forces. I do not find a conflict between meaning and visual opulence, between commercial culture and content. I am interested in the challenges of trying to forge a pictorial landscape in which anything could be included, but that seems to possess its own logic.
Jackie lives and works in Philadelphia. She is an Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.