October 2008
ANNA JAAP --- Apparent Horizon
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Anna Jaap has always reached for the sublime in the prosaic. Her colors come from the earth, from the soil and moss and leaves of the forest, and the grasses and sod of the prairie. Sunlight plays across her canvases, and fog rolls over them. Wayward leaves and branches scatter as if after a storm, invented sunrises and sunsets give rise to the title, yet the paintings are abstract in essence. Jaap's work is essentially grounded, and organic in nature, but ethereal and ephemeral, as well, suffused with the mystical. Reality and spirit meet and marry in these paintings.

The paintings in Apparent Horizon are like poetry, filled with meter and visual rhyme, they are like music, rythmic and fleeting, they are like fruit, luscious and ripe with understanding. These works are larger than Jaap has previously crafted, yet the size only enhances what we knew was there before, in the smaller canvases that now appear to have been explorations or sketches for the larger scale that would follow. Jaap's mind has always been expansive, but now her work is following suit.

Jaap is inspired by everything around her - walks in the woods, alongs streams, at any time of day or evening give rise to inspiration, so that although these paintings are about nature, they are also paintings about dreams and explorations, belief and fantasy and truth, in short, these are paintings about life at its most varied and beautiful.

Susan Aurinko
Curator
 

September 24, 2008
Sweetness and Dark: New Works by Lori Field and Anna Jaap
Nashville Scene

By David Maddox

"The wintry images featured here show bare branches painted in silhouette, over and under broad strokes of luscious colors that run from pastels to deep glowering tones. These paintings, for all their simple elegance, contain important elements of chaos. In several, Jaap draws on the surface with a felt-tip marker, an unstable instrument for drawing that tends toward scrawls. The marker scratches emerge from the landscapes as small, nervous voices of disorder.

More significantly, all of the paintings have black or very dark undercoats that come out through the brighter colors. The not-completely-suppressed dark streaks act as whispers of death, generating an ominous low-level rumble. These dark base tones, together with the marker scrawls, build a sense of wildness, something untamed and resistant to enclosure—a furtive, feral streak that is itself a pursuit of life. The sweet colors and solid organization of Jaap's paintings provide a context for darkness and messiness to express themselves dynamically—Eros and Thanatos inevitably paired.

If Field and Jaap's images share prettiness on their surface, they also have common ground in giving mythology modern form. Field's contribution is the creation of a fairy-tale kingdom that suggests our multicultural present has within it the fabulous variety of a land we would know from travelers' wild tales. From simple forms, Jaap wrings out the deep erotic forces that drive myth."