Eileen Kennedy     Paintings

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Jam
Egg tempera on 3 gesso panels, 24 x 54" 2025
$10,000

This triptych was born of my vision of a joyous concert in the woods, with wildlife as the audience. I sought a dynamic, multi-figure composition to serve use an armature to support a tapestry of nature. Gathering the source materials I needed was like going on a treasure hunt. My brother-in-law and his other musician friends let me photograph one of their jam sessions on the back porch. Next, I hired professional models to pose for the tambourine players and additional guitar player. A friend whose daughter was a falconer let me photograph her coopers hawk. Even the deer in my back yard posed! I began with individual figures drawn to scale on newsprint. Then I cut them out like paper dolls and arranged them in various ways until the composition felt right. From these, I created a cartoon with the entire composition (one for each panel) and added trees in the background and falling leaves in the foreground. From the time I began the drawing process, this piece took 14 months.