Hands and Feet

Jamie Platt

Artist Statement excerpt

Painting feels like excavation as much as an act of building. When I start a painting, I don’t know exactly what I’m after. Instead, I find out what is there by doing the work. The act of making a painting externalizes the cause and effect of inspiration. I can see it, touch it, think about it, share it. 

 Themes in my work vary with themes in my life. Some of the themes are documentary. One  summer, after a semester of long and frequent car trips, I painted a series of parking lots. I had been spending so much time getting in and out of cars, I thought that work would be about cars. It wasn’t long before I realized I was actually interested in the parking lots as spaces. The gray asphalt bellies reflected the colors of the sky and they and the sky were always changing. It was a surprise to see the way that  gray seemed simultaneously to be bluish and pinkish and yellowish.

Artist Bio

Jamie Platt
b. Grand Rapids, MI

Jamie Platt is an artist with an MFA in painting from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and a BFA from Kendall College of Art & Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After graduation from Indiana University, Platt travelled to Italy on a teaching fellowship where she taught drawing to American students studying abroad. She spent many years teaching painting, drawing, color theory, and design at the Herron School of Art & Design in Indianapolis before moving to the suburbs of Washington DC where she taught courses in drawing, painting, and color theory for adults in the Smithsonian Resident Associates Program. In 2019, She accepted a position as the Gallery Director for Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia where she worked until December of 2022. In addition to her professional roles in the arts, Platt is an active painter, exhibiting work regionally and nationally including recent exhibitions at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City and Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the Summer of 2022, she was awarded an artist’s residency at Farwell House in western Illinois. Platt is currently writing the third edition of Drawing for Dummies and serves as the Director of Gallery and Events for the University of Central Missouri. She lives in the Waldo neighborhood of Kansas City with her husband and four cats.

Opening Reception | July 14th, 2023 5:00 – 7:00 pm 
Artist Talk | 6:00 pm

This exhibition is sponsored by Yingling and Nuessen Insurance Agency