Closing Reception: Gretchen Durst Jacobs: What the Body Carries

Member’s Spotlight Exhibition for Gretchen Durst Jacobs

“My paintings begin with the body. I work at a scale that matches my full reach—fingertip to fingertip—so each mark records movement, presence, and intuition. The grid holds it all in place. It gives me something to push against. It’s not about control, but containment—a way to hold chaos, memory, and motion all at once.

Though my work is abstract, it is shaped by 25 years of painting directly from observation. I grew up identifying birds, plants, and insects with my parents, both musicians and amateur naturalists. Summers on my grandparents’ farm taught me to read the weather, notice seasonal shifts, and understand time as cyclical. These rhythms still guide me. Nature wasn’t just a backdrop — it was how I made sense of things, especially while growing up with a mother whose moods were unpredictable and overwhelming. I watched how the land adapted: trees bending around fallen trunks, still growing.

I use color, gesture, and layered marks to process the full spectrum of lived experience – grief, trauma, joy and survival. Sacred geometry appears as a structing force, a visual and emotional anchor. I am interested in how a line can hold chaos, how paint can become a kind of memory. Everything I make is an attempt to reconcile feeling with form, to honor what we carry, to map what cannot always be said.”

This event is FREE and open to all.