A native Californian artist, JP explores the ideas of joy and memory with her figurative yet abstracted oil and acrylic paintings. She spent her childhood living in a small town at the edge of the Mohave Desert and moved to San Diego as a young adult. The duality of experience formed by growing up in a small, rural, isolated community and transitioning to adulthood in a large, urban, accessible city sparked a curiosity about what exactly brings joy and what destroys it, and where the balance hangs in between. She considers this an investigation of nostalgia of the present.
Her work is centered around portraying with paint that perilous moment somewhere between joy and sorrow, in the attempt to concretely capture the experience of realizing a memory is a joyous one while simultaneously grieving the loss of it fading.
She earned a B.A. in Visual Art (Studio) from UCSD and worked for several years as a decorative painter and muralist before becoming a full‐time studio artist. JP’s work has been shown with the Oceanside Museum of Art, the City of Encinitas and at the University of California, San Diego, San Diego Art Institute and San Diego State University. Her work can be found online at www.jpwackenstedt.com.
