Today we’d like to introduce you to Jen Hitchings.
Hi Jen, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I grew up in Lincoln Park, NJ, my dad was a tile-setter, my mom a secretary, and I’m an only child. I was always drawing, either when alone, on the back of a placemat at a restaurant, or to pass time while at one of my parents’ jobs with them. They divorced when I was quite young and both worked a lot so sometimes I’d be brought to the real estate office at night or tile & marble warehouse in Fairfield, NJ (which is where my first admin job was in high school) and they’d give me paper and I’d draw whatever was in the room. Always representational. I wanted to study architecture but met someone who quickly changed the course of my life when I was 16 and taught me that art was more than just realistically rendering objects. I obtained a BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase which was incredibly transformational in so many ways and truly solidified my decision to pursue a career in the arts. Through my teenage and college years, I went to a billion punk and garage rock shows–music was an enormous part of my life. I play guitar and sing and was in the band NEVER for 3 years in NYC but I really dove very deeply into the art world, moving to Bushwick, Brooklyn right after graduating. I interned at and then co-directed a few artist-run galleries, volunteered for Arts in Bushwick, and kept making paintings while working day jobs at galleries and artist studios. I took classes in the business of art and went to school at night to get a certificate in small business & entrepreneurship from CUNY Hunter in 2018.
So I learned a LOT about art organizations from many perspectives. Spent every Thursday and Friday night at openings for years and years either bartending at the spaces I co-directed or worked at, and many weekends gallery sitting or in the studio. In 2019 I decided to found an artist-focused consulting agency called Studio Associate, operating solely online with occasional pop-up exhibitions in NYC. I wanted to act as a dealer and consultant for a few dozen contemporary artists that I already knew well and felt were not getting the attention they deserved. Then in 2021 after the pandemic stripped the fun and a lot of my close friends out of NYC, after 10 years living with 2-4 roommates at a time, cycling as my primary mode of transportation, and making paintings in mostly small sub-sub-leased studios that I could barely afford I decided I needed a big life change. I applied to Claremont Graduate University for Arts Management and got in, but after talking to a bunch of people about the high cost of attendance, decided to pursue other options on the west coast, and fortunately landed a job at CalArts in the Career Services department, so I relocated to LA in September 2021. Part of the draw to southern California was the landscape–I desperately wanted to be surrounded by the environments I was making paintings of.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Oh no, no. A rollercoaster is the right way to describe “it.” I never made more than twice the income of what my rent cost in NYC and even that was only one job that lasted 10 months and I was fired from in an extremely toxic way which did some real damage to my self-esteem. Serendipitously though, the week after being fired I was offered my first solo show to take place 6 months later, so I collected unemployment, worked cash gigs for artists, and went to school at night while developing that show. I have to say every one of my darkest moments was quickly turned around by some opportunity, or better yet, I was able to accept said opportunity because of whatever dark shit had just happened which usually left me not tied to a day job. I thought I’d be in NYC forever, specifically Bushwick/Ridgewood, but my patience ran out after being so broke, working so hard, and seeing such little financial return after 10 years. Somehow as soon as I moved to Los Angeles things started working out in a lot of ways–not all of course, I had left my biological family and my huge artist family, my partner, and basically everything I knew behind to start over.
I don’t know, being an artist and/or running your own business on nights and weekends if you don’t have a lot of wealth or connections to wealthy people can be exhausting, disheartening, and feel pretty thankless. Especially in one of two of the most expensive cities on earth. But befriending dozens of people working just as hard as you, who would rather live extremely frugally, illegally, and in the shadows than have a traditional, comfortable life; who are constantly pushing boundaries and collectively shaping cultural progress–there is no financial value assigned to that. I still feel that in Los Angeles, especially given my role at CalArts, but my quality of life is just much higher here than it was in New York. The plants and hills give me so much energy and inspiration. I go birding and hiking and hang out with amazing painters as much as I can. My studio is a bedroom in my home, so I spend almost every night after work painting and actually get a lot done despite spending 40-50 hours per week at or getting to and from work in Valencia.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My paintings are of what I call psychosexual or surrealist landscapes. I reference photos of places I’ve been mostly in the woods of the Northeast and desert of the Southwest and draw rough sketches from them, then make monochromatic paintings from the sketches. I translate the environments into psychological scenes that usually connote a specific season, temperature, or time of day, and arrange elements to form suggestive patterns or allude to figurative forms. There’s always a sexual undertone–tension, warmth, undulation, tangents. Mountains as breasts, succulents as phalluses, flowing red rivers or waterfalls, crevices in geological formations. In March of 2020, I was in an AirBnB in Pond Eddy, NY, with my partner, and shelter in place orders descended on the entire country, and we were lucky enough to be able to stay in the idyllic house along the Delaware river. We kept extending our stay and spent 3 months there. It was possibly the most transformative time of my life. My paintings changed drastically–something about the quality of light, watching the dormant, dry, brown landscape blossom into lush spring, watching the river flow around the hilly state gameland across the NY/PA border, the isolation… so much about my work changed at that time, and since then, I’ve developed a specific way of making paintings that truly merges all of my ideas and considerations about nature and humanity.
I’d like to think people know me for dedicating a huge amount of my time and energy to helping other artists, bringing people together, and cultivating somewhat DIY communities of creatives. And for working really, really hard, while always maintaining a painting practice. I’m very proud of the years I worked for Pierogi Gallery in New York –Joe Amrhein, Susan Swenson, and Justin Amrhein became and still are like family to me, and they generously taught me most of what I know about contemporary art and how to live a rewarding, fruitful, meaningful life dedicated to the arts and deep relationships. I’m also very proud of my time co-directing Transmitter Gallery in Brooklyn, and to have been able to put on so many incredible shows with artists I adore including Elliott Green, Robin F. Williams, Michael Stamm, Pedro, Jonathan Chapline, Josh Liebowitz, Angela Heisch, Alessandro Keegan, and so, so many others. I’m just proud of knowing and being close friends with so many incredible artists, thinkers, and humans that inspire me, make me laugh, work with and brainstorm with me, and are willing to spend time in my presence.
What are your plans for the future?
I have work in several shows coming up–I’ll be showing with Anat Ebgi at the Felix art fair in LA in February, a group show at Aout in Beirut, a group show with WOAW in Hong Kong, and a solo with Taymour Grahne Projects in London, all taking place before the end of April. Going to London for my solo will be my first international trip since 2017, so I’m really looking forward to that. I also keep telling myself that I’ll buy a cabin somewhere rural before I turn 35 at the end of this year, which will probably not happen but I’m going to keep checking Trulia and Zillow anyway. My life goal is to run an eco-friendly artist residency and farmshare somewhere in the US, so I’m constantly talking to friends and looking at real estate to brainstorm what that would look like.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jenhitchings.com
- Instagram: @jenjonesjones
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenhitchings/
- Other: www.studioassociate.com
