“Mom, where are you? Can you hear me? ” I say this sometimes just for fun, especially near her memorial day. The 20th of December. I sit here in my studio, only ten minutes to go until my break is over, babies will be up, I need to take a shower and vacuum and start the chicken and sweet potatoes. I needed to come in my studio and do something, lay down some color, some red and green for the season. With added darkness for winter, for death, for turning inward and quiet. I chose to work with only watercolor today. My studio is also nice and clean now giving me clarity.

  
 I wrote my Bio this morning for the GAP shows coming up. Do you want to read it? 

Ok here it is:

Jennifer Amy Hynes is a mixed media artist and writer from Northern California. In her studio nothing is off limits, paint, paper, charcoal, stitching, ripping, stomping, scratching, gluing, spontaneous mark making and automatic drawing are some of the ways she gets started. Emotions, past life experience, Global Political concerns, the human experience fuel the fire, as it roars she works on many pieces simultaneously, leaving a trail of discards, until through the smoke a single piece is revealed that speaks to Jennifer, a simple idea. The trash is then reused the next day as collage or departure points for new work. Fragments of thoughts become fragments of discarded and torn up pieces that are reborn into a new piece or are part of Collaborations with her Global Art Project colleagues. Jennifer has found refuge with the members of GAP, a place where free thinking and free expression thrives. The group, many she’s never met in person, speak a similar language. She says, ” I was nervous at first, to meet up with two of my GAP colleagues to work together, but when we started gluing, drawing, and painting on one piece, then the next, it was spooky, we were in sync, we spoke the same visual language.” This experience has shifted the way she looks at her own work when operating solo. She says, “It feels like I can stand back further from my own work and look at it with a more open mind, look at the ART, not be too self critical” When Jennifer is not working in her studio she is taking care of her soon to be two year old twins, Jack and Fiona, or writing about them and life as a working artist and mother on her blog, http://www.dirtylaundryblog.com.

Jennifer didn’t take the traditional route, a troubled teen she dropped out of High School, hitchhiked across the United States to live in New York. She returned to California, went to Contra Costa Community College in Richmond California, transferred to California State Hayward University to earn her BFA, then most recently received her Post Baccalaureate from the San Francisco Art Institute focusing on printmaking. She has been in several group shows in the bay area and is eager to share her work and the collaborative work she is doing with GAP with the world.