Jocelyn Fine

Artist Statement

About Me
Jocelyn Fine is an abstract painter who teaches art at Montclair Kimberley Academy. She graduated from the University of Vermont with BFA in visual art in 1991 and earned her MS in Architectural and Painting Conservation from Columbia University in 1997. She spent 2 years studying Painting Conservation at the Istituto Per l’Arte e il Restauro in Florence, Italy, and completed conservation internships at the MoMa, the Guggenheim, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Jocelyn’s work is held by many private collectors throughout the United States. Her paintings were featured in NJ Home, and NBC’s George to the Rescue. She comes from a multi-generational family of artists, filmmakers, collectors and gallerists. Her great-aunt was one of the first female gallerists in NYC (owner of the eponymous Rose Fried Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side); her mother is a sculptor, one brother is a painter, another is a filmmaker and her sister is the head of an Art Finance company.

I am fascinated by the search for what lies beneath the surface and by exploration of the process involved in creating something from nothing. My art is informed by my experiences as an art conservator, a teacher, a yogi and by growing up in a family of artists. Guided by the energy around me and my intuition, I work impulsively, allowing my gestures to turn into marks. I often paint with my hands, rollers, crayons, sticks or found objects. I love the unexpected and the accidental. Adding on and wiping away, each layer of paint and brush stroke represent a moment in time, aging and also being reborn. I am drawn to the feelings that colors evoke and the effect and intensity they have when they share space.

Recently, I have been working on large scale paintings that explore my childhood memories, accessing emotions and sensations that reside deep in my consciousness. I am also very interested in the concept of place and my relationship to geography. I spent most of my childhood summers traveling in a blue Chevy van that my dad outfitted into a home for the 6 of us. Tables transformed into beds, draped netting became suspended sleeping cocoons for us kids. From this peripatetic home, we visited nearly every national park, crisscrossing the U.S., Canada and Western Europe. From 1970-85, we kept journals and recorded our adventures. Unlike my siblings, words did not come easily to me, but the vibration of colors, rhythm, shapes and forms of these magnificent places left indelible impressions, etched into my visual memory. These paintings all evoke places that I saw and the feelings they stirred in me.