Jenna Boyles

It was the first day of spring.  I was frustrated and feeling like I was not making progress with my artwork.  I had so many ideas, but I didn’t know where to begin.  A few days earlier, I found the cassette tape of Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints that I had listened to and loved as a child.  I hadn’t heard it in years and the songs got stuck in my head.  They acted like a stopper to my overflowing thoughts.  Now that I had this relic, this cassette, I felt like I had a secret power and I felt the urgency to create.  I threw together remnants of past work and things I had been collecting – eggshells, palm branches, ashes of last year’s Easter food – symbolic to me and of me, and hauled them up the fire escape.  I put on a sheet knowing what I wore would become part of the painting and I liked the classical reference. I turned on the cassette player and for the duration of the album, I danced more than painted on the canvas.  I ran around and over it.  I felt a connection between the music, my action, and the surroundings – the cars below, the helicopter circling overhead, the church bells, the sky.  I had set up the video camera because I didn’t know exactly what I was creating.  In the end, I found it was this image of timelessness, happiness, freedom, beauty, truth, energy, and strength.