“In my sketch books I draw from artwork and take notes on what I am reading.  Paintings come directly out of those drawings.  I love painting wet into wet, so I try to get the entire painting covered at once when I am working on a larger painting – this can be very physical, like a performance or a ritual.  I aim for the color to be completely intuitive.  The color source has been medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, Lindisfarne Gospels, or the book of Durrow.  I make my choices as spontaneous and intuitive as possible, there is an element of randomness to them.   I am looking for a surprising sense of color with a light source that comes from within.  I tend to work in layers, letting a painting sit for a while until I go back into it.

I turned to sculpture to support the new work.  I sculpted the acrobat in plaster to see how the form turned. I liked that I could look at the sculpture from different angles, distances, and light – how the form, shape and volume could engage with the space.  This was especially important to me as my source was a drawing from a bronze age stone carving, which is flat and graphic.

Since then sculpture has become part of my process and I am thinking more often about making sculptures connected with my paintings.  The gold boat sculptures came from a painting; I had a need to see the boats as independent forms in space.” – Elisa Jensen

Read the full interview.