Kasini House Studio Resident: Jolene Garanzha

During her February and March 2008 residency at Kasini House, Jolene Garanzha painted portraits of Vermont women.

The portrait is a traditional art form that began as a tool for documenting and remembering the dead. As societies and cultures evolved, so did the portrait. During the Italian Renaissance, the portrait was as much a tool for documenting the personality and social status of the subject as it was for simply remembering what the person looked like. In the twentieth century, the portrait followed movements in art. English painter and art critic Patrick Heron, for example, was deeply influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque and these are reflected in his portraits of Sir Herbert Read, A. S. Byatt, and Thomas Stearns Eliot. Warhol’s portraits reflect his own brand of American pop.

In June 2007, ARTnews documented how portraiture is becoming increasingly conceptual and reaching beyond painting and photography to include video, collage, and installation. The article concludes with a quote from Dan Cameron, the newly appointed director of visual arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans: “Portraiture is vital—increasingly so. We are losing our identities through the bombardment of media imagery. Portraiture shows us who we are and how we feel about who we are: our identities. It’s like a barometer.”

With this sentiment in mind, Kasini House asked Jolene Garanzha to take our pulse and produce portraits of Vermont women. During February and March 2008, women sat and Jolene painted them in watercolor on paper. The results of her residency are on display at Kasini House April 2nd to May 24th, with a reception and catalog release on Saturday, May 10th.

Garanzha lives in Burlington, where she teaches at the Community College of Vermont, the Shelburne Art Center and as a private instructor. Her work has been exhibited throughout Chittenden County. She has a B.A. in Studio Art from the State University of New York at Binghamton and an M.A. in Painting/Drawing and an M.F.A. in Painting/Printmaking from the University of Iowa.