Private: Jenny Kastner

Jenny Kastner is a Canadian artist whose work explores landscapes as portals to deep, imagined and nostalgic relationships to place and the subconscious. With vibrant intensity, she pushes the contemporary landscape tradition into the realm of magical realism, using colour and movement and compositions with big pull. Kastner has been featured by internationally acclaimed arts and culture blogs, Booooooom, My Modern Met and DWELL, as well as She-explores, a blog about women connecting to the outdoors.  Her work most recently went up for auction alongside renowned Canadian artists Kim Dorland, Gavin Lynch, Anne Griffiths and Kyle Sheurmann in the Art Auction For Old Growth, raising funds to safeguard some of Canada’s most vulnerable ancient ecosystems.

She currently paints from her home studio where Clear Lake meets Stoney Lake, a dynamic biodiverse physical meeting place in Ontario where the granite rock of the Canadian Shield meets the limestone of the Lowlands, magically termed ‘The Land Between.’ She spends her winters surfing and living in Costa Rica, soaking up surf culture and road tripping with her family, which inspires her work in a multitude of ways. Kastner holds a BA in Cultural Studies and History and a BEd from the University of Toronto in Arts Education. Her work is in private collections across Canada and the US, Barbados, Grenada, Costa Rica, South Africa, Australia, France and the UK.

“Gestural and graphic in nature, my work is grounded in a desire to draw the viewer into a particular experience of place by capturing both subtle movement and a deep vibrational pull of the landscape as I see it. This intense kinetic depiction of landscape invites viewers to imagine moving through the composition, acting as a portal to much deeper imagined relationships to time and space and the inner wilderness of the human experience.  They are an invitation to connect deeply, to listen carefully to the spirit and pulse of place and to recognize ourselves as nature amidst the noise of modern existence. I work from video and photographs as well as memory, composing sketches and studies, coming up with compositions and conceptual expressions that push traditional ways of seeing, before executing a large work.” – Jenny Kastner