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Sille Jensen is a Danish artist based south of Copenhagen.
Sille Jensen, Madonna with infant, 2003. Mixed media on canvas, 12 x 15.7 inches. Courtesy of the artist.I believe in dirty hands. Before I really took up painting, I experimented with other media like radio, sound, and photography. Yet I never felt at home working with these media as they lack the tactile quality of painting and drawing. Working with a camera, a tape recorder, or a computer never gave me a sensual immersion, or the dirty hands I get from working with a pencil or a brush. When I do a portrait or a nude study I often have the feeling of actually touching the model. The pencil follows the eye, which follows the lines of the body like an invisible extension of the artist’s finger. A nude study leaves traces on the paper, but also it leaves evidence in the mind and on the body of the artist. I am left red-handed in more than one sense. I do not use models in my work anymore, and the things I try to explore and express are not things that actually exist in the concrete, physical world. Nonetheless, the perception of the sensual, material world and its tactile qualities, are still a central element in my work. The strange, alchemistic practice of using my hands to explore and transform thoughts, senses, or feelings into something material (paper and canvas,) which will then be perceived as something non-material (color, moods, and emotions,) is a process that is still central in my work.
Because I paint figuratively, I often find myself navigating between the conscious and the unconscious, between the verbal and the wordless. My works usually start out rather consciously–with a sense, a thought, or a feeling. The words get lost in the act of transferring my ideas to canvas and paper. Something else, something wordless emerges. I believe that any artistic expression is a statement. It is communication at some level. Usually I can state in words and writing what my starting point was. In the process the works gain something and they end up containing more–often something very different–than what I started out with. Just as the human ear can only perceive limited sound frequencies, human language can only convey a very small part of the impressions paintings make on us.
Like many other artists, I have the experience that it is the work itself, rather than my will that drives me in certain directions. That is, I cannot say that I ever chose to work figuratively, it feels more like this method and these themes just forced themselves onto my work and demanded to be given form. Human life themes–and especially those of female life–just snuck into my work and it looks like they will be staying around for a while. I have worked with a variety of female-themed imagery, including: a mother’s fear of her own children dying in a series of paintings which to the viewer may appear to be sleeping babies (Sleep, 2001- 2002,) the oddness of human sexuality (Asymmetry in Kissing, 2002,) female life-cycles, from childhood to womanhood, and the frailty of that transformation (Puberty, 2006,) and fertility and decay (In the Red, 2007.) Although I have a great affinity for a lot of male artists, I especially admire those female artists who have let their gender play a role in their oeuvre including Paula Modersohn-Becker, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Ursula Reuter Christiansen.
