Jennifer Pochinski is an American figurative painter whose work is characterized by the sensuousness of paint. Relationships, the male-female power dynamics and autobiographical elements are key themes in her work.
She was raised in Hawaii and received her BFA from the University of Hawaii in Painting in 1991. Much of her young adulthood was spent traveling and living on the mainland USA and Europe. She settled in Greece early 2003 to raise her two daughters. In 2007 she received a degree in Interior Architecture from AKTO in Athens. Then after 11 years in Northern California, Pochinki moved to Providence, Rhode Island to pursue a more creative and conducive environment for painting.
She has also exhibited in New York, London, Los Angeles and Seattle. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review and Huffington Post and the American Scholar.
“My paint handling is done with speed and economy. I have always been a fast painter. But that just means the paintings need to sit longer with me to figure out what they are supposed to be. I work on multiple pieces - as many as 9. In fact my whole studio always feels like it's in limbo. Once in a great while I finish a piece. I need to work almost blindly where nothing is off limits otherwise I get totally gridlocked- searching for the ‘right’ element in the composition. It gets to a point where my decisions and options get more and more narrow . That's when I let go of them and it is so hard to do that. But then come back in one week, month or year as the person who knows way more than the person who started the piece.
I concentrate solely on the figure. Without the human presence I think why bother? Thanks to the internet we are constantly bombarded with bodies. This provides me with so much to work from. If I like a figure, I will use him in many instances. If it works- keep doing it! My visual vocabulary is made up mostly of male bodies. I used to think it was a female gaze thing. Or that most of these fellows were memories from my formative years, growing up on the beaches in Kailua Hawaii. Watermen, bathers, posers, and spreaders etc inhabit my paintings. I thought maybe they were manifestations of some deeply entrenched fantasy that stems back from that time. Now I recognize these fellows as myself. My male and female side uniting and becoming whole.”
