Mixed Media and Digital Art
website: www.jeanninechappell.com
email: [email protected]
phone: 510-206-7992
Jeannine Chappell spent the first 18 years of her life in Atlanta, Georgia, and attended university in North Carolina and graduate school in New York City. She then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and, in that fertile creative environment, began exploring her artistic longings. She leaned toward two-dimensional work, liking the inherent degree of abstraction, and worked especially with paper, exploring many media—watercolors, graphite, colored pencil, water-soluble pencils and crayons, ink, charcoal. She became especially fond of drawing and studied art at various arts institutions and colleges in the area, showing and selling her work periodically during this time. She also developed her skills as an architectural designer at a firm in the East Bay that specializes in residential remodeling, learning on the job and becoming a project manager.
About 20 years ago, at the urging of her husband, Jeannine began exploring the possibilities of using the computer with her work, something she had been reluctant to do because of the image of mechanized computer art. However, as she explored working with Photoshop over the years, she developed a unique style that lets her combine the spontaneity of working on paper with the editing capabilities of the computer. She creates a drawing or quick painting on paper, scans it into the computer, and then edits it in Photoshop. She works in multiple layers, which allows her to manipulate one portion of the image separately, e.g., to darken or change the color, size or shape of a portion without affecting the rest of the image. The computer work is by far the majority of the time spent on an image. A high quality signed print, individually printed, matted and framed, is the typical presentation for her work.
For the last ten years Jeannine has worked predominantly with bird images, and especially the owl, which she finds to be a compelling subject. Her goal with the owl is to communicate the combination of beauty and power in this fascinating animal. She has often photographed educational owls in captivity as her models. In 2016 she traveled to the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin, and began to create images of the world’s cranes.
In 2009 Pomegranate Communications began publishing a wall calendar of her owls, publishing a calendar of her work every year since. They have also published note cards and holiday cards of the owls. After enjoying decades of life in the Bay Area, she and her husband moved to Sequim in the summer of 2017.