Jenny Toth

Biography

Jenny Toth is a painter who also works in sculpture and collage. She has always worked from direct observation where she strives to paint the world she sees in a way that reflects her inner thoughts and feelings. She recombines forms and spaces and works from inventive still lifes. Her work often includes animals, a life-long passion, and, a subject she connects deeply with. Her work can feel whimsical or even funny, or at times poignant, but always honest to her experiences.

Jenny is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery where she regularly participates in group and solo shows. She is also represented by Tabla Rasa Gallery in Brooklyn. She has shown her work nationally. She graduated with a BA from Smith College and an MFA from Yale School of Art. She then studied for two years at The New York Studio School where she gratefully learned about color, form, space, and metaphor. She also spent a few summers at Chautauqua Summer Institute studying with the amazing Stanley Lewis, among others. She is very grateful for the passionate, wise, and unparalleled teaching she encountered in these places.

For 23 years Jenny has taught full-time at Wagner College on Staten Island where she is currently an Associate Professor of Art. She teaches painting, drawing, and all kinds of special topics courses where students have adventures such as painting murals and drawing pigs at a sanctuary. 

When not painting and teaching, Jenny might be found talking to an octopus at an aquarium, sketching parrots at Central Park Zoo, or trying to figure out how to spend more time with donkeys. Her husband, two young boys, and two dogs keep her on her toes as she juggles all these responsibilities and possibilities.

Artist statement

I am a painter and mixed-media artist working in New York City. My work has always been done from direct observation of the people (often self-portraits), animals, interiors, and landscapes around me. I strive to reflect both the surprising visual relationships I observe and something of my personal life and emotions in the process.  My training at Yale School of Art and The New York Studio School has given me a deep interest and love of plastic space, color relationships, and the ambiguities inherent in representational painting. I am a daughter of a memoirist, and I have always appreciated sharing honestly the sometimes funny, sometimes awkward, and sometimes sad moments in my life. Often I look to animals to reflect these emotional states. Although I consider myself a painter, I have worked with many forms of media including printmaking, stained glass, bronze, and most recently papier-mâché and clay.

For the last five years, I have been creating work that is sculptural in source or finished product. I started this exploration by creating dioramas made from my young son's drawings of whales, guns, boats, knights, and dragons. I used these as models to paint from.  

My most recent body of work are paintings, high-relief paintings, and papier-mâché sculptures that celebrate birds and my passionate connection to them. At sanctuaries and zoos, as I draw birds (who never should have been bred as pets or held in captivity), I experience feelings about confinement, both in their world and in mine. I realize the human contradictions of loving and admiring animals while keeping them in cages for entertainment, education, or companionship. My art reflects these feelings.

I have always loved all animals, especially donkeys, elephants, and octopuses—subjects that have been my muses. But I never felt much affinity to birds until I started volunteering at the Wildlife Bird Fund in New York City.

Then I lost my heart to a very special bird. When my family spent the summer of 2019 in San Miguel de Allende Mexico, I met a beautiful scarlet Macaw with an outsized personality. Chapo lived alone in an outdoor cage at a nearby restaurant. Adequately tended but mostly ignored, we quickly formed an attachment as I kept returning to draw him—and talk to him. I spent as much time as I could with Chapo. When the restaurant was closed, he would scream out to me when I walked by. In some of my work, I hear those echoes. [Since Chapo was an endangered species, I could not adopt him and bring him across the border. Later I learned that he was moved to another facility, where he bonded with a female bird and shared her cage.] 

In Mexico, I started working on a large papier-mâché sculpture of Chapo. I now intend to create a papier-mâché zoo of animals, which can be subjects in future paintings. 

My most recent work began with drawings and air-dry clay relief sculptures done on-site at Free Flight, a nonprofit parrot sanctuary in Del Mar, California, and at the Bronx and Central Park Zoo. In these places, I have studied and befriended several birds as I tried to adapt to working on a moving subject. As I continue to complete these pieces in the studio, I incorporate self-portraiture, implying a yearning for a deep connection to my subjects. Originally conceived as models to paint from, these relief paintings eventually became their own finished body of work.

With humility, I try to capture what I see in color and form, not to create a photograph but to one woman's perspective. In the process of doing this imperfectly, I hope my work becomes embued with personality and hope.