Elisa Jensen is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work merges a profound sensitivity to nature, memory, and the passage of time. Her paintings, primarily rendered in oil, are meditations on light and its fleeting presence, inspired by the natural radiance that James Joyce described as “the whatness of a thing. The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The Mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal.” Jensen explores the transient beauty of light in her works—whether it’s the woven shade of a deep wood, the glimmer of a river at dusk, or the gentle dawn filtered through a bedroom window. This attention to fleeting moments, combined with Jensen’s poetic sensibility, brings her canvases alive with an ethereal quality that captures both the immediacy of a scene and the misty nostalgia of recollection.
Elisa Jensen was born in 1965 and graduated from Smith College with a BFA, and from the New York Studio School. She currently teaches at the New York Studio School and Pratt Institute. She has received awards for her work from New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2015), National Academy Prize for Painting (2010), John Koch Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2009), and Revson Foundation Fellowship (1993). She is also a member of Corner artists’ group (Denmark, 2015). A selected list of her solo and two person shows includes Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY; The Painting Center, New York, NY; Kimmel Gallery, NYU, New York, NY; Valentine Gallery, NY; Royal Danish Consulate General, New York, NY; Morsø Kunstforening, Denmark. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Two Coats of Paint, Whitehot Magazine, Hyperallergic, Artcritical, Artefuse, Tilted-arc, The New York Sun, New York Daily News, and The New York Times. Elisa Jensen lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.