Artist Trivia: Yvonne Jacquette

Who is this artist?

This painter was born in 1934 in Pittsburgh and spent their early childhood growing up in Stamford, Connecticut. They attended the Rhode Island School of Design and upon graduation, moved to New York City to paint.  An airplane flight in 1969 to San Diego proved to be a pivotal experience that sparked an interest in aerial views and perspective for this painter. Seeing the world from this vantage point prompted further study into cloud formations and weather patterns by making sketches from their seat in the airplane. This painter would utilize these sketches to inform their larger scale paintings. Such aerial perspectives would become a defining aspect of this painter’s artwork. This painter taught at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and their work can be found in over forty museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C.

We celebrate this painter on December 15^th as they turn 88

Who is Yvonne Jacquette?

Yvonne Jacquette grew up outside of New York City in Stamford, Connecticut. She married fellow painter, Rudy Burkhardt who was 20 years her senior. Yvonne Jacquette splits her time between New York City and Searsport, Maine. Her first visit to Maine was in 1954. She spent the summers of 1957 and 1958 painting on Monhegan Island. Early in her career, Jacquette chartered a plane to explore the Maine landscape from above. It took a handful of trips for her to get comfortable with this new environment as she initially experienced dizziness and nausea. By the fifth trip, she made a successful drawing of Ducktrap Beach. These flights spent exploring the midcoast in a plane led to her signature style, observing the world from up high.  She brought a box of pastels and made quick sketches and took photographs that she used in her Searsport studio to make larger scale paintings. She depicted the landscapes below with shifting planes of paint strokes and abstraction.  Tim Keane of Hyperallergic once noted of Jacquette, Her works’ cohesiveness and significance are the result of complicated, semi-abstract color fields, a concise and meticulous kind of pointillism, and the manner in which each of her paintings dramatizes the predominance of organic forces over the artificial.