Jeanine Grimes is the premiere female metal sculptor of Northern California. A graduate of the art department of Sonoma State University in 2001, Jeanine had excelled in her student exhibitions, as well as her commissions and private collection acquisitions. Her welded metal landscape sculptures have also been installed in front of public buildings in several municipalities within Sonoma County.
Most recently, in December of 2002, Jeanine installed one of her largest pieces on the di Rosa Preserve in Napa County. The installation took many hours, and the transportation of her piece required heavy equipment to deliver for the final installation of "Tremulous Paradox".
But, there is more to her piece, "Tremulous Paradox", than meets the eye. Jeanine's personal history, as a child, was not easy. Today is an age where marital relationships suffer from the strain of an age gone recklessly and ever more uncontrollably into the future. Her childhood witnessed both these stresses imposed by both her parents leading ultimately to her own battered relationship with her father, and the eventual collapse of her stability with her mother.
Cast into the world trying to piece her life together, and heal her childhood wounds, the world of art became her best outlet to express her many moods as well as her many conflicting emotions. From photography, to digitized photo collage to working with clay, wood and metal Jeanine searched for her primary medium of expression. Eventually no medium attracted her resolve and determination to express her self as did working with metal, and the process of welding of metal together to form her elegant sacred geometric shapes.
From her early beginnings in found metal objects, to the welding of metal geometric shapes, Jeanine Grimes found the medium of metal not only a medium to pit her strength against, but also as a medium requiring a great deal of determination to shape and bring under her artistic control. Jeanine mentored with accomplished metal sculptors in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and began to assemble and acquire all the welding equipment necessary to complete her ideas. As her own artistic life took on maturity, her unresolved personal conflicts with love and attachment were escalating. Her attempts to build a successful relationship were short lived and many times ended in a disastrous emotional cathartic explosion of deep-seated anger and frustration.
But, even as she was living through her own personal needs for love and belonging her passion for sculpture grew gaining the attention of her academic peers and eventually one of the most prestigious collectors on modern sculpture in Northern California at the di Rosa Preserve. Her latest piece "Tremulous Paradox" was successfully installed, and as the setting sun gleamed off of the newly treated metal supports Jeanine Grimes had finally given expression to her personal life, and by forces she had hardly knew existed produced one of the most unique self portraits in two mediums diametrically opposed to one another... i.e. straw and steel.
"Tremulous Paradox" is a contradiction in form. On the one hand it displays the certainty and stability of a rigid structure...i.e. the outer form. Inside the outer structural form is another smaller rigid structure suspended in mid-air by a cable, and filled with straw. The suspended rigid structural form is a cage with a trap door on the bottom, and is connected by a cable in order to lower and hoist the suspended rigid inner structure.
The straw inside the inner structure represents the uncertainty of the artist's mind as well as the indeterminate nature of all organic matter. In the weather the straw rots and eventually falls apart only to be replaced by new straw via the trap door.
Creating a paradox has symbolically been achieved by showing how things really do not appear, as they may seem. Mirrored through the permanent rigid outer tetrahedron is another smaller tetrahedron that is prey to the wind and sways imperceptibly in space while its contents are locked and trapped inside.
The artist's thoughts are symbolically represented by the straw, and the artist's visible expression of her outer persona is represented by the rigid outer form. The inner rigid form moves and changes position while it contains those thoughts caged and trapped within their rigid form. Here displayed before the space of the viewer stands the framework for all to see. The edifice of Jeanine's outer self is supported by her catholic roots of the father, son and Holy Ghost trinity represented by her tetrahedrons. Inside her outer visible expression is the other aspect to Jeanine Grimes which also mirrors her divine roots, but her confessional caged self with the trap door is filled with a myriad of thoughts trapped and forever only to be released by her private executioner who can empty her soul only to hang her again within her outer body with a fresh supply of angst and frustration.
The piece "Tremulous Paradox" shows the hidden torture and torments that have driven Jeanine to hang herself in the name of God begging that her executioner, the social system from which she came from, can empty her of her misery.
Having followed the work of Jeanine Grimes for over 8 years I have come to know her different styles and modes of expression. I have also learned about her personal life style and how she has had to adapt and cope as an artist in a run-a-way world escalating itself into its own private doom of deceit and religious hatred. Jeanine's relationship to the world and to herself has been portrayed in her latest piece "Temulous Paradox". At one point the beauty of form is juxtaposed with a fleeting scream of entrapment as the straw begs to be blown away from the rigid structures of society which has kept Jeanine a prisoner of her own soul.
I believe it takes this solid determination to want to express which gives to her piece an emotive quality deserving a permanent place isolated on the hills of Napa County as was the cross on legendary Calvary Hill. Now Jeanine can see her misery, express her accomplishments, and give to the viewer the inspiration of how important our personal freedoms really are.
I think we will see more works from Jeanine Grimes portraying the complex mixtures of the inner workings of the psyche for a long time to come.
For other artists Jeanine has given a new form to the inner workings of an artists mind set. Jeanine has woven divine inspiration of sacred shapes and has methodically detailed her own personal life with the incorporation of mechanical and mythological symbolism. "Tremulous Paradox" serves as an art piece to ponder how little we know of the observed world we live in, and know that beneath the veil of reality is another world begging to be seen and heard.