Jennifer Perlmutter, artist and gallery owner

 

I first met Jennifer back in 1999 when I was living in Los Angeles and teaching with her husband, Sean, at a school on Wilshire Boulevard called Theatre Of Arts. 

At the time, Jennifer was not only painting, but she was doing a lot of furniture restoration work and upcycling, long before it became so fashionable. 

She had already mastered gold leaf application, all sorts of painting and textural and media approaches to a variety of surfaces, including the difficult art of chinoiserie. 

By the time the year 2000 rolled around, she and Sean had opened a repair studio in a space that had once been a meth lab on Pico Boulevard. 

My wife and I left Los Angeles that year, but we have enjoyed keeping in touch.

The new millenium was just the beginning for Jennifer. After moving out of Los Angeles back to her native central California, she opened a gallery (pictured above) at the exquisite town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. 

Here is the gallery website: https://jenniferperlmuttergallery.com/

This is titled Sunshine from her Place In Mind collection

This is Jumbulaya from her Collage Stories collection

Here is Bloom, also from her Collage Stories collection

Jennifer in her gallery stands surrounded not only by her own works. The gallery on occasion will host a guest artist, as well. In June, 2022, it featured Into Pieces, Into Place by artists Chloe Corriveau and Lauren Michelle. 

Jennifer's focus nowadays is less on furniture restoration and more on her gallery and her own canvases, and her mixed media work. Examples of these, some of them framed, are on sale on her web site.

I find her paintings, many of which are quite large, altogether extraordinary. They're full of vitality, blending tension with optimism, a collision of forces influenced by sometimes fine Asian lines meeting the scope and colors and irridescence of Turner or Chagall, for example. 

Here she is with Sean, I believe, hanging one of her paintings.

This is the first cover we did together, with the publisher Caleb Mason at Publerati choosing to frame Jennifer's image and superimpose the seated Magritte-like art viewer. As the title story of the collection is about a female art teacher, I think this image quite fitting.

This is the second book cover we did together, a chapbook of poems which won an award that year, 2013, from Robert Henry at Leaf Garden Press. https://leafgardenpress.blogspot.com/

The name of Jennifer's painting here is Outside Inside, which Mr. Henry and myself thought entirely in keeping with the spirit of the poems.

The most recent and the third book cover image was chosen by editor Marc Estrin and production editor Donna Bister from a selection of images that Jennifer agreed to provide for my second book of short stories with Fomite: https://www.fomitepress.com/our-books.html

The title of this painting is Stay, and I think Marc and Donna chose well as the painting's stormy mixture of symmetry and chaos is in keeping with the nature of each story in the book.