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David Donovan Jensen: The Recordings of an Artist
Bicycle Fine Art artist, David Donovan Jensen is a painter, but he may be more accurately described as a sculptor of space. His environment seeps into the canvas, reflecting sounds, songs, moods, and the physicality of the outside world – diffused smoothly and soothingly within his work. Paintings, such as Snow Hymn, have a stillness that portray a quiet movement in them, a cool color that drifts in, calmly, like the first days of winter.
But David’s practice is anything but calm. In an artistic process that takes up every square inch of his surroundings, David begins on the floor where he lays his raw canvases flat on the ground. While horizontal, a series of acrylic washes are laid down. He uses a power sander to uncover the textures and undulations of the surface behind the canvases; a phase of the production that he himself equates to a massive leaf rubbing. You can see this effect in his piece Wave Hymn, which, if you didn’t know it was created on canvas, could be mistaken for a gorgeously worn cut of painted wood. At this point the piece has moved to a wall, another bit of floor, a different stretch of wall, and so on, until David feels the work is done.
Looking at works like Wave Hymn or Grey Hymn, you can see the difference in the surfaces that David used. Wave Hymn (aptly named by David who has likened himself to a surfer “lurking around for the perfect wave”) has broader strokes, the rises and falls are longer and thinner, with little divots hidden within the sweeping strides. Grey Hymn, on the other hand, is more decisively layered and dense, with knots tucked in, as though looking out on a densely populated horizon through a thick, mysterious fog.
“I’ve always been interested in work spaces and [with this new body of work] my paintings have started to look more like the space where the work was done. I feel that now I’m just recording these spaces where I work.”
Currently, the space that David is recording is an old-carriage-house-turned-studio in Northeast, Minneapolis. It was an art studio twice before (formerly occupied by artists of the Walker Museum) and before that, it was a carrier pigeon house –leading to a worn surface and rich creative space that feeds David’s work.
The Ocean Hymn paintings No. 1, 2, and 3, David’s newest series on paper, perhaps best bring to light, the original surface from which he draws inspiration. According to David, “the pattern comes up much faster” on paper and the movements across its surface are much more limited, dictated by the thinness of the material. The immediate relationship between the paint and the surface produces a notably intense difference in the blend and color. There are active divisions between the reds, blues, and pale greens in all three pieces, conveying a confidence on the part of the artist, who must make divisive decisions when handling the reactive materials. In a departure from his usual works on canvas, these paper paintings are slightly smaller in scale than the rest of his Hymn series –and the concentration in size allow him to play with powerful punches of color and texture.
