Jeanne Lorenz is a Vallejo-based abstract painter whose practice is grounded in daily drawing, embodied walking, and a deep ecological awareness shaped by extended treks along the Pacific Crest and John Muir Trails. Her work emerges from an ongoing engagement with uncertainty, natural systems, and the relationship between personal experience and planetary change.

Working with a post-tragic mindset and an intimate understanding of ecological limits, Lorenz connects hand and mind through a process of mark-making that composts emotional and cognitive experience into visual form. Her paintings, often vertical, water-formed, and suggestive of both landscape and the human body,explore presence rather than resolution. Drawing from feminist inquiry, observation of natural systems, and a lifelong study of color, she creates images that hold grief and joy simultaneously, reflecting both the human condition and the broader meta-crisis of our time.

Lorenz earned her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 1998 and her BFA with High Distinction from California College of the Arts in 1994. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including White Room and Outer Boroughs at White Columns (New York), 100 Drawings at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island City), Interior Excess at The Drawing Center (New York), and Shadowshop at SFMOMA (San Francisco).

A mother, teacher, long-distance hiker, and lifelong student of color, Lorenz has taught painting, printmaking, and design at Solano College since 2008, where she is a tenured professor of art. Recently, she has incorporated observational painting outdoors from nature to deepen and inform her abstract studio practice. Through an attentive engagement with color, space, and light, her work becomes a form of participation into an ongoing inquiry into perception, interdependence, and what it means to remain awake to the complex issues of our moment.