Bill Jensen’s Paintings Are Totemic Abstractions
Bill Jensen’s paintings are overpowering. They don’t apologise. They’re powerful abstractions, often signified by unconventional compositions and a profound sense of colour, his surfaces saturated and densely worked, primordial, totemic, borne out of the unconscious.
It has been said that Jensen has spent his artistic life swimming against the tide of what the public expect of a painter and in that sense he is a painters painter, there is no sense of style, no care for the industry, the market, the profit. No, Jensen seems oblivious to it all, he is determined to follow his own path, his own calling; to create a painting that captures the moment when his artist’s impulse converges with his material’s properties, a clarity that may never happen, may take years. Either way Jensen’s paintings reflect that search and he has been doing so for over 50 years.
When it comes down to it Jensen is an old school painter, it is about the craft – he makes his own paints and tools – and the process. After all without process there is no result.
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