Reflecting On Wonder: A Solo Exhibition with Lindsey Jaeger
SKyPAC’s Main Gallery welcomes Reflecting On Wonder: A Solo Exhibition with Lindsey Jaeger November 2 – December 15, 2019.
LINDSEY JAEGER of Union, KY is a visual artist, patent attorney, wife, and mother of two. Through large-scale acrylic paintings and diminutive, intricately detailed scratchboards, Jaeger explores her fascination with micro-landscapes and natural found objects, such as birds’ nests, bulbs, and butterfly chrysalides.
Growing up on a Christmas tree farm in Northern Kentucky, Lindsey began her art career at the age of 14 selling gourds she had hand-painted as whimsical Santas. By 16, she had prints of an acrylic painting, Kentucky in Bloom, which depicted a map of Kentucky with 41 native wildflowers geographically arranged as to where they grow, selling in Kentucky state park gift shops. Also, at 16, she won Kentucky’s first Junior Duck Stamp art competition. After the Governor’s Scholars Program, Lindsey was the valedictorian of her class at Larry A. Ryle High School and remembers fondly being dubbed “Mother Nature” for her extensive leaf and insect collections.
Lindsey Jaeger earned her undergraduate degree in fine art with minors in biology and chemistry from Georgetown College. She studied 19th Century British art history, which emphasizes capturing minute details from observations of nature, under the late Ilaria Bignamini, a curator for the Tate Museum, and drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford in England. She studied portrait painting under a former president of the Royal Academy of Portrait Painters. While earning her juris doctor at night from Salmon P. Chase College of Law at Northern Kentucky University, Jaeger supported herself as a muralist.
Recently reappointed by Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin to the board of the Kentucky Arts Council, the nature artist has enjoyed the detail, light, and drama that may be captured in the unforgiving scratchboard medium for more than 25 years.
Jaeger shows her work in selective juried shows and in solo exhibitions. Most recently, Jaeger exhibited a solo exhibition, Reflecting on New Beginnings, at the Janice Mason Art Museum in Cadiz, Kentucky during August and September of 2019. In May 2019, Jaeger won the Memorial Art Award at the Eighth Annual Exhibition of the International Society of Scratchboard Artists at the Kentucky Artisan Center in Berea. In April 2019, her Dutchman’s Breeches scratchboard exhibited as part of Botanik 2019, a juried exhibition of botanical art, in Laguna Beach, California.
In addition to developing and exhibiting her body of work, Jaeger offers scratchboard art workshops, online courses, portfolio reviews, creativity coaching, and creativity and wellness retreats. For more information, please visit www.lindseyjaeger.com.
Artist Statement
Reflecting on Wonder by Lindsey Jaeger
“The human brain cannot possibly process all of the information around us,” says Duje Tadin, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, in ScienceDaily. Dr. Tadin says, “Being less sensitive to things that are less important makes the brain more efficient and faster at accomplishing the more important tasks.”
In our electrified, pulsating world, full of endless options and others’ opinions, we are increasingly tuning out the beauty and opportunity that is quite literally right underfoot. A return to sensitivity to the smaller, “less important” objects of Nature is good medicine.
To intentionally rejuvenate our innate sense of wonder will stimulate our minds to consider new thoughts about tired beliefs. As an added bonus, wonder feels incredible—like excited amazement. And it’s accessible. If we can’t get there on our own, Nature gives us ample opportunity to wonder. The wilderness is not required. A simple backyard will do.
Consider the common bird’s nest. Is it not fascinating that a bird knows how to build a nest? We usually consider the use of found objects as materials and tools as within the exclusive realm of man, and yet our common, but no less extraordinary, backyard songbirds know this. But, is it not even more fascinating that a bird knows it needs to build a nest? The bird knows its purpose. Interestingly, the purpose requires the bird to work until the task is accomplished no matter the quantity or severity of obstacles that are presented.
Consider the butterfly. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, everything, except the caterpillar’s brain, liquifies inside the chrysalis. Are we willing to sacrifice what is good to build something great? Does it take one decision or a million? Is discomfort required? If so, is it worth it? If a caterpillar can change, surely, we can. After all, each of us is equipped with the world’s fastest supercomputer, the human brain.
Consider the great oak. Each mature oak produces thousands of acorns each year without any consideration regarding the success of any of them. The oak produces a staple at the base of the food chain. Yet, the only intention, if the oak could have one, would be to reproduce itself. As a byproduct of this purpose, the oak subsidizes the community. Likewise, when we actively seek great goals, the abundance-oriented mindset required for achievement produces abundance, economic and otherwise, that trickles down to the community at large.
It is my hope that my Reflecting on Wonder series inspires you to intentionally rejuvenate your sense of wonder, perhaps about new beginnings, and to consider Nature and your own beliefs from new perspectives.
