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(Hollywood, CA—July, 2004) “Emerging Intent” is an apropos name for abstract expressionist painter Jennifer Rae Ochs’ forthcoming gallery showing opening September 18 at the BGH Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamont Station. In the journey of every emerging artist, each gallery showing is a significant milestone. For Ochs, “Emerging Intent” coincides with a ten-year anniversary as an expressionist artist and stands in evidence of her continuing commitment to “paint with mad intent.”
“My goal is to live with passion,” says Ochs. Indeed, the colors and textures Ochs uses are so alive, one is compelled to check her canvases for a pulse. “When people view my work, my hope is that it elicits emotion and brings alive passion for them, and that people take away from the experience a recognition that there are no boundaries,” Ochs says.
Expressionism is frequently misunderstood. By definition, expressionism depicts not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that are aroused in the artist by events and objects. Ochs’ paintings certainly seem to connect emotion and unseen energies in an evocative dance on canvas, employing a charismatic style and a daring and profound use of color.
The power of her pieces is proven in the strength and variety of responses Ochs has witnessed through the years from viewers approaching her work. “Abstract expressionism resonates with some people and yet others can’t get a handle on it,” observes Ochs. “I think it’s because they get caught up in looking rather than seeing, in thinking rather than feeling. Be it positive or negative, the greatest compliment an expressionist can receive is to know that the viewer was strongly moved in response to your art.”
Discussing the approach to her work, Ochs says “I personally enjoy being outgoing and charismatic, but I also like the shut-down mode. That’s what painting allows me to do… to shut down and be silent with myself, to reflect and release and
communicate everything that’s been going on in my soul and my heart and my mind… what I’ve been seeing, what I’ve been feeling and what other energies have been affecting me and how I perceive that.”
Ochs’ choice of abstract style was literally instantaneous when she approached a canvas for the first time. One night, while hanging out with an art student friend in college, she was offered an extra canvas. “When I first picked up a brush it felt too structured and I decided to use my fingers instead,” she recalls, smiling. “It was freedom. Even today, I usually begin a piece by squirting paint and mixing it on the canvas.” An unconventional approach for an artist proudly defying convention.
“After that initial introduction, I was lucky in my association with another artist friend of mine, a woman who I consider a creative genius,” says Ochs. “She was very kind and encouraging and saw something in me and my work, and so for birthdays she would give me brushes and books.”
Although Ochs became the only non-art major in a college sculpting class, she did not immediately make the switch in her focus of study to visual arts. After completing her bachelors from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, she instead set out to follow another private passion— travel.
“Ever since I can remember I’ve loved traveling and so for birthday and Christmas gifts my parents always gave me airline tickets,” says Ochs, who hails from a close-knit family in Forest Lake, only 25 miles from her alma mater.
“I was fortunate enough to travel through Europe numerous times and to backpack through Australia for a few months,” Ochs recounts. “People I met on the train would make suggestions about where to stop. It was fantastically random. That was how I found myself in Byron Bay spending days with a group of monks and then staying with a commune of hippies on the eastern coast of Australia. I toured to sand islands, went scuba diving around the Great Barrier Reef and had a completely amazing time, all off the beaten trail.”
“ In South America I hung out with jungle folk and shamans and was very blessed with some extraordinary experiences,” she continues. “That’s the glory of travel, meeting different people and immersing yourself in other cultures, in other ways of seeing the world. In each new place it feels like your eyes are forced open at all times.”
Returning to Minneapolis, Ochs continued painting and the pieces of her work began to “accumulate.” “In a few years I had a dozen pieces, and every year after that I have completed close to a dozen more,” she notes.
After moving to Los Angeles in late 2001, she began to bring her private pursuit into the public eye, encouraged by showings and sales. While she is also classically trained in piano, and currently experimenting in clothing design and creation as well as in co-producing for television, the multi-talented Ochs continues to feel the strongest artistic connection to her painting and the abstract work she does, working mostly with acrylics.
“Abstract expressionism for me is a very pure form of art,” Ochs says. “I think that openness that one must have to the wild energies of creation begins with the release of fear and a kind of magical surrender to the process.”
Jennifer Rae Ochs’ exhibition of her abstract expressionist paintings, “Emerging Intent” opens September 18 and runs through October 17 at the BGH Gallery, Building D4 in Bergamont Station (2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica). BGH Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm, and on Sunday from 11am to 5pm.
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