My sister's gentle art...

 

From earliest memory 'Jessie Kareen' was to me, at least, a genius in all of the artistic mediums that she approached. Tiny sea shells gathered from a beach on the east coast of Scotland became like creatures from a Star Wars planet overnight. Glued with pipe cleaners, painted deftly with no more than a nail polish brush that had been discarded by our mother or perhaps she borrowed one surreptitiously while we were left to our own creative devices. Eyes, noses, features and twisted poses that became characters in children plays. I was mystified by her skills, for art never became my fellow life-companion; that was to be music.

A mermaid sculpture in plaster of Paris shaped onto chicken wire: it was astonishing to me: hair lovingly striped with a needle, a shapely body and the bizarre fish tail, all hand sculpted from within her mind.

But Jessie also worked with textiles, sewing and embroidery as if it were a skill brought with her from a past life. I asked her to "make me an Indian outfit" with beads and belt and all the frills: she did so, very quickly, linen cloth, hand stitched trousers, a smock and headband, 'First Nation' stylised bead patterns adorning what could have remained a simple 'one day' school theme outfit. Even a wig made from combed hemp, dyed black and, of course, a feather. I felt like a great Chief in midst of what we would now call cultural appropriation. Certainly these historical Hollywood stereo-types are nowadays to be explained in full, but also in a direct way, the cultural transmissions through even reading a book or seeing photographs are all part of emulative art. 

'Oils on hardboard' paintings emerged next: bold chess pieces, iconic knights tackling a bishop with a stealthy rook protecting from a distance. It was Fischer vs. Spassky season after all, Positioned upon a burnt red and yellow chequer board. Or, spirit people, floating ballet dancers in blurred tutus, on a backdrop of sky blue to azure, keeping your gaze from every angle.

 

Training to be a hair stylist aged 15, Jessie worked as an apprentice in Germany, reading books, Goethe's Faust, Kafka, Heinrich Böll, et al. To this day, it seems to me an omission that she was never given the opportunity to join a foundation course in Modern & Fine Art, and then to progress to her preferred mediums.

Travelling across Europe as an engineer's kids meant that aged 15, school was over and academic qualifications had been missed. But there were gains too: excellence in a foreign language and wider exposure to new cultures and artistic history such as Vienna and Italy.

 

It is hard to summarise Jessie Kareen's oeuvre, since she tackles anything that inspires her: Ceramics, Pottery, Quilting, Flower pressing, Handicrafts. She has reached out to all these and more. Currently she has developed and is working in a unique style, highly detailed, almost 'inverted pointillisme (the points becoming tiny hollow bubbles) drawing/painting style. We zoom in, to find leaves, each so finely placed, or tiny bubbles that amalgamate like human cells, then, tones in a back-wash that provides transitional mood swings and bathes our retinal cortex with a feast of colour and hue.

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Woman and man, 'Loving Couple' (above/opposite) presents the predicament of freedom from oppression, whether in one-to-one relationships, from slavery, from poverty, from gender hatred. In life the Yin and the Yang should be a solemn balance.