Jeanette Pasin Sloan

“I started in my small kitchen at seven at night. I was 23 and my two small children were finally asleep. I got out my how-to-do-it books and my journey learning how to paint and draw began. I had no skills. Days before I decided to copy every object in my kitchen over a two year period. In that time, I painted an air conditioner unit, a TV, a high chair and a chrome toaster. My degree from the University of Chicago as in Art History. I thought I would become a teacher. The idea of becoming an artist had never entered my mind. I was a wife and mother; a housewife. In my mind, artists were men living adventurous lives in Paris, drinking and having late-night boisterous arguments with other artists. I was stuck in my kitchen with two children asleep in the next room.

One day while painting objects in my kitchen-world, I hit upon the chrome toaster. Stopping to see the reflections I became fascinated. It began my fifty year career of study and reflections. Reflections became my subject matter.

Reflections tell us who we are. As children, our encounters with objects, mirrors and water begin to show us what we look like and what the world around us looks like. Reflections teach us that there is clarity, order and chaos. Reflections don’t always behave in ways we might predict. The reflections I saw in my kitchen began to define my world and my place in it. Reflections became a metaphor for my life with its order and disorder; its insight and doubt; its realism and abstraction. My work might resonate with others defining our common world full of certainty and mystery.”
-Jeanette Pasin Sloan 2021