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On the walls of Jenny Kruger’s newly opened gallery, you’ll find scenes from Pamlico County. Old pickup trucks near fields. Grain silos. Heaps of nets on the back of trucks. Homes whose barely painted sides look as though they’ll soon become one with the earth.

The crumbling-down-house has been done before, and in watercolor, too. But these aren’t your usual watercolors. Move in closer and you may see why the unpainted siding on the house seems so authentic and jewel-like at the same time.

The visible knots and waves of wood grain provide some clues.

Jenny paints on panels of birch wood. Directly on the wood. Which is not the usual way to do it.

Most artists would take that panel and prime it first with gesso and then paint on it. But a few years ago, Jenny says, she skipped the primer because she liked the woodgrain on a panel, and sketched and watercolored directly over it.

And so, “by accident” she discovered the technique she’s been using since.

Watercoloring right on the unprimed birch lets the waves of the wood show through. You can see it in a truck door with a hint of watercolor, just as it simulates a shimmer of sun light on the outer planks of a house.

Once the watercolors are applied, Jenny says, she then varnishes – or polyurethanes, depending on what she has on hand — the entire panel a few times. On some of them, she then uses a solid color, in oil, as a backdrop to offset the rest.

The technique, which she says she hasn’t seen elsewhere, has served her well, whether on the scenes from the county or the portraits. Even in some of the faces, you can see the woodgrain coming thru, along with an uncanny lighting. It’s as though the wood were translucent.

Jenny who says she’s “always” been painting, says she’s not seen this technique done elsewhere. She succinctly describes it as, “Mixed Media On Panel” on the cards beneath her works.

Those same cards give the names of the paintings. All of the scenes from Pamlico County — the trucks, the buildings, the grain silos — have GPS positions for titles. Latitudes, then longitudes. Degrees and minutes. Nothing else.

Jenny says she named them all that way that because, she says, these sare “places that won’t be here in another few months.” At least, not looking as they do now.

Naming the scenes “after where they are” on GPS, she says, will allow someone to be able to find the site using the coordinates, no matter how much iathe scene may have changed from her painting.

Those who want to find Jenny Kruger’s paintings needn’t use GPS. Her work is on display at the art gallery she opened on June 2 on Highway 55. (It may have the distinction of being one of the few art galleries with a Genie garage door opener hovering over the scene.)

The gallery, at 22562 Highway 55 (where Oriental Screen Printing used to be & just up the street from Tidewater Real Estate) will be open Fridays thru Sundays from 2-4pm through the end of July.

It will not be open on the weekend of June 22-24 because that’s the weekend Jenny and Jason Boudreault are getting married. In August they are moving to NY City where Jenny will finish up her final year of school.

Posted Saturday June 9, 2007 by Melinda Penkava