Jennifer Pitchers

A professional illustrator by training, Jennifer Pitchers recently moved into figurative oil painting following a break to start a family. Inspired by her experience of motherhood, and the transient quality of her own childhood, her work explores the insatiable human hunger for connection.

Her work, however, is not confessional. Instead, she pieces together parts of her life through memory and feeling, creating ‘mind collages’ that explore the human need for safety, and security. The landscape backdrops in her paintings are a claustrophobic, recurring exploration of where home is, or is not.

Jennifer’s figures are not whole-bodied. Instead, she crops them to examine closely the tension at the place where two bodies meet. Yet while an investigation of relationships requires narrative, Jennifer’s work focuses on the primal and animalistic, the intensely physical and psychological drive for biological attachment. The soft, flesh-rich limbs of her figures, at times, push together so violently to satiate a need for maternal comfort, that they appear to devour each other. Despite that violence, Jennifer’s work is seductive and sensual, drenched in non-naturalistic colours.

Informed by her training at Camberwell College of Arts, where she graduated in Illustration, she combines this enjoyment of rich colour with an understanding of line that draws on the work of German artist Käthe Kollwitz, and that artist's ability to draw the body 'holding itself meaningfully'.