A native Californian artist, JP explores the ideas of joy and memory with her figurative yet abstracted oil and acrylic paintings. She spent her childhood living in a small town at the edge of the Mohave Desert and moved to San Diego as a young adult. The duality of experience formed by growing up in a small, rural, isolated community and transitioning to adulthood in a large, urban, accessible city sparked a curiosity about what exactly brings joy and what destroys it, and where the balance hangs in between, as one can have joy in the most unassuming, mundane moments as well as exciting, extravagant ones.
Her current work is centered around portraying with paint that perilous moment somewhere between joy and nostalgia in the attempt to concretely capture the experience of realizing a memory is a joyous one while simultaneously grieving the loss of it fading.
She earned a B.A. in Visual Art (Studio) from UCSD and worked for several years as a decorative painter and muralist before becoming a full‐time studio artist. Her work has been shown at UCSD, SDAI and SDSU and you can see her current show, Little Pink Houses, at the City of Encinitas Community Center through mid-October. Her work can be found online at www.jpwackenstedt.com.
