CityView Magazine

CityViewNC.com | 21 N ew city, new baby, new grief, new joy, and now another "first," artist Jeniffer Hutchins' first solo show in Fayetteville. Like layer upon layer of paint upon canvas, it's an exhibit of transformation. From the first meeting of brush to paper, she discovered in school a passion for oil painting and fellow artist Dan Hutchins. They married in 2000 and the next year, Hutchins finished a degree in art education from Rhode Island College. She began a succession of teaching jobs that took her from Rhode Island to San Diego and back east to Raleigh. "I just love that energy being around children," she said, "but I decided I wasn't devoting time to art." Sunday, Oct. 11 "We journeyed to the cliff town of Rocamador today. … There is a grand cathedral in the top center of town. Those on pilgrimages would walk up the hundreds of stone steps on their knees to reach the cathedral. Walking down those same steps I felt a wave of emotion fill me." So she quit teaching and focused on painting. The North Carolina scenery inspired two series of landscapes, "Carolina Back-Roads," exhibited at The Nature of Art Gallery in Cary, and "Our Backyard" at the Sertoma Art Center in Raleigh. Hutchins even collaborated with a photographer to capture just the right light, the perfect outdoor moment in the "Backyard" series. In fact, Hutchins rarely turns her brush on people, and even when she does, seldom are they the focal point. In "Gone Fishing," an empty dock becomes the viewer's dock, no one else's. It's a tool Hutchins often uses to make a link between a painting and its audience. "It connects the viewer with the place," she said. "It sort of becomes the connection between man and nature and man and God, to bring it in that deeper level." But above all, it's a sense of peace that Hutchins wants to convey in her paintings, a lush field in "Fenceposts" or a rich sunset in "Grace." But Hutchins also knows about life's upheavals. Two years ago, her husband accepted a job as a lead artist at Immersion Media, a Fayetteville computer animation and graphic design firm. The couple also discovered they were expecting their first child. Hutchins called her mother, Janice Gilbert, in Rhode Island with the exciting news. Hutchins said her mother was so elated it gave her reason to take care of a medical problem she had been avoiding and hadn't mentioned to anyone. Within the week, Gilbert saw a doctor about the lump on her arm, a lump that turned out to be a rare form of cancer which had spread to her brain and lungs. As Gilbert A trip to France last fall offered Fayetteville artist Jeniffer Hutchins, top, a chance for reflection and renewal.

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