Jaime Foster

Northwestern Oklahoma State University's video guest artist lecture series did a lecture with Jaime Foster.

She is a self taught painter and photographer. She used to take old barn doors and paint them. This kind of propelled her into her current painting career. She does abstract work with acrylic, mixed media, and India ink on wood canvas.

Foster started to detail her process for working on her paintings, but I think she got distracted and did not finish it, because what she said didn't sound like it lined up with how long she said her paintings take. She said she starts with making a foundation for the background, then using a dip pen with India ink outlines areas that speak to her. She also mentioned that she adds paper and mixed media, trying to incorporate colors and ideas what what she is looking at. Her technique changes in each piece, and two of the pieces she showed took 100 hours each. I am sure she must do more layers of painting in between, since her background foundation painting looked very different than the finished result.

Her paintings are often based in nature - they are abstract but use features from mountains or glaciers. The titles all come from songs that she likes. I really don't understand how that works with her theme of nature, but she listens to music while she paints so maybe she just picks a song that sticks out to her?

One piece in particular, titled "Cease to Begin" was inspired by her move from the pacific north west  to Chicago. The mountainous setting of the Cascade mountains was a big inspiration for the forms in the piece. When asked about her color palettes, she said one was inspired by place, but when asked about the colors in "Cease to Begin", stated, "That's the beauty of abstract", which I honestly thought sounded like a cop-out. I really liked the finished results of Foster's paintings, especially the India ink outlines over the paint, but I just could not understand the themes or why she does these works. I think she just paints to paint and uses random colors or does what she feels like, which is fine, but I wish she could have clarified that and not put her work in some mysterious category for people to interpret.


Watch the lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN3ow3E6Eec