Artist Statement – Jeanne Lorenz
“I’m digging for something I don’t understand.”

In an age shaped by cascading crises—ecological, emotional, epistemic—I paint because I must. My practice is rooted in the belief that art can metabolize the turbulence of our time. My drawings compost emotional energy—grief, restraint, joy—so it can be transformed, not discarded. The daily act of drawing is my ritual of rewilding, a small rebellion of presence in a system running on distraction.

I’ve created over two thousand abstract drawings, each one a fingerprint of the day’s inner weather. From these, I develop vertical colorfield paintings—tethering the fluidity of mind to the stillness of form. The vertical format echoes the human body: upright, vulnerable, enduring. My marks are handmade and unrepeatable, a personal-universal language I’ve forged through repetition and attention. This is how I stay in dialogue with the moment.

Painting for me is not escapism—it is engagement. It is how I roll up my sleeves and take part in the long arc of repair. I approach the surface with a post-tragic mindset, which means I’ve given up on fantasy fixes and instead focus on meaningful participation. The work is humorous, light-filled, grounded. It’s grief-aware but not grief-stricken. In painting, I plant seeds in the rubble—hopeful not in outcome, but in action.

I am internally and intrinsically motivated to make these images. There is no market incentive strong enough to fuel this kind of consistency. What drives me is the need to tether inner life to outer form, to locate some coherence amid entropy.

I hope these works transmit a kind of usable energy—emotional, aesthetic, maybe even ecological. They are my offering to a world in transition. Let’s compost what’s no longer serving us and see what might grow.