UNM painting instructor Kathleen Jesse said she isn't really a painter.
She makes paintings, thoroughly realistic ones at that, with acrylic and pencil, but she still says she's not a painter. She said she likes to think of herself as an image maker.
She spoke at the UNM Art Museum's Tuesday Talk about her show, "War Paintings for the Nursery."
"A lot of times if we use paint and we call it a painting, it doesn't have anything to do with the discourse of the image," she said. "The image is very important to me, so it makes me think that I am more of an image maker."
"War Paintings for the Nursery" is as strange as it sounds. Although the study gallery downstairs in the museum is only housing five of Jesse's pieces, the show is visually complex. Each piece keeps its viewers' attention as they ponder what "War Paintings for the Nursery" means.
On Tuesday, Jesse took an audience of about 50 on a visual trip though her career in painting with an hour long slide show. Jesse's work, which ranges from monkeys riding horses to transgender Madonnas, is diverse, yet cohesive. It almost seems like characters from each piece took a little trip into other pieces to see what they are like. And who can blame them? Jesse's diverse use of scenery is spectacular and playful.
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Other pieces are reproductions of other artist's work, of course with a Jesse twist - a monkey here, a Catholic saint there.
"That work is basically stealing images and putting someone or something else in it," she said.
Replicas of Goya's "Saturn Eating His Children," and Frida Kahlo paintings are among her collection. Nothing is sacred and everything is frighteningly silly. "Self Portrait of George Stubbs" shows the famous painter painting himself as a monkey. And these aren't the kind of monkeys that swing from the trees happily while munching bananas. These are mean, sharp toothed, ready-to-bite-your-head-off monkeys. While teaching in Florence, Italy, Jesse came upon a natural history museum where the monkeys were stuffed in the late 1800s in outrageous poses, scary teeth intact, and brought them into her work.
Beyond monkeys, Jesse has a thing for dogs, male dogs with one kidney bean spot to be exact. She paints them into her altar pieces, her newer paintings and all by themselves.
"I don't know how these dogs got into my work," she said.
"War Paintings for the Nursery" unfortunately shows none of this work, except for the dogs. She spoke very little Tuesday about these works but more about how she got there. Jesse told stories about her childhood where she spent countless hours alone working on her art, her anecdotes about Florence where she said she was only chosen to teach because she didn't have a penis, and about later living in a two-room, dirt-floor house in the Manzano Mountains.
"War Paintings for the Nursery" spoke volumes of her experience. Although Jesse says it is mostly about the image, it seems as if maybe it's more about the journey.
What: "War Paintings for the Nursery"
When: Through July 25
Where: UNM Art Museum
Price: Free
