S01E05: Jenny Chisholm - landscape painter. Glendhu Bay.

S01E05. Jenny Chisholm. Landscape painter.Landscape guides meJenny Chisholm was “unmade” for the first time at two weeks old. Offered up. Then chosen. Adopted into a Bay of Plenty farming family, the youngest of five, with free range of the bush and paddocks from the moment she could walk. She's been drawing on that first monumental act ever since: in her landscapes, in the family she built, in the way she shows up fully, wherever she is. We're parked at the edge of Glendhu Bay, looking north across Lake Wānaka to the mountains that speak to her, and have ever since she and a girlfriend first visited the Matukituki Valley in a Bedford camper van over 30 years ago.There are some parallels between how Jenny became an artist and how she became a mother, but neither path followed a straight line. After leaving school at 16 to become a hairdresser (a career she pursued at the highest national levels for fifteen years) she unwittingly learned the fundamentals of sculpture - looking at a “blank canvas” of material, and knowing what she needed to remove to unveil the artwork hidden underneath. Jenny spent her late twenties as a trailing spouse, together with engineer husband Neville exploring and working in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and later India. These adventures included opening a yoga studio and art space in Delhi, where she shared her artistic knowledge and skill with street children, doing, as she puts it, most of her real personal growth in such places where life was hard. Upon returning home to start a family in 1998, Jenny retrained as an artist in Tauranga, graduating with a Diploma in Art, Craft, and Design, and when nature and science failed to provide biological children, there was a special circularity to the concept of adoption. The children arrived fast: a son with just four days' notice, a daughter eight months later, and as if there wasn’t enough happening, these joyous life additions were accompanied by a relocation to Christchurch, then Central Otago. It was here that Jenny illustrated the children's book Shrek: The Famous Hermit Sheep Of Tarras for the local primary school, learning to paint in watercolours from a nearby caravan, while the school's children learned how to change her baby's nappies. That book is now in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and has gone on to sell well over 50,000 copies, funding computers and a second full-time teacher at the school. After years of supplying commercial galleries around New Zealand, Jenny made a conscious decision to move toward something more direct: artist-run collectives and public studios, that enable conversations with strangers who wander in while she's painting, and stay longer than they planned. What comes through the work - the semi-surreal landscapes, the skies and clouds, the ghostly guardians, the trees encouraging us to look up - is an artist who has spent a long time learning to wait before she acts. Her personal mantra, “stop, pause, reflect”, didn't come from yoga or India, but organically from within: absorbing what she feels before trying to make something from it. There's a heaviness in some of the paintings. The weight of the world's in them, but so are the mountains, and the water, and the light on both. Jenny's been watching and seeing it all, every day, filing things away in her visual diary, waiting for the moment when she’s finished reflecting, the feeling is right, and she knows it’s time to paint.Instagram: @jenny.chisholmFacebook: @jennychisholmnzartistArté Collective: www.artecollective.nz This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com