Tiny figures dwarfed by the landscape - fragile and fiesty, fearful yet brave. The beauty of Lorelei Jenner's creations is that we know just how they feel.
Story Vera Larsen, Photographs Stephen Goodenough, Art Lorelei Jenner
Women floating above the world in a protective bubble or enjoying a private, crazy dance are among the quirky inhabitants of Lorelei Jenner’s world.
The largely self-taught artist, 41, is inspired by the people around her; she gets ideas, literally, everywhere. Taking her pug dog Frida for a walk in the Christchurch seaside suburb of Southshore, Lorelei spotted a woman battling the elements, leaning into the wind. The image inspired the painting The Truffaut Slant, where a family, including their dog suffer from an imaginary syndrome which causes life to be lived at a permanent angle.
The Circus Bride , depicting a bride on a trapeze, her bouquet cast to the ground, grew out of Lorelei’s years as a hairdresser. Having worked with wedding parties, Lorelei observed that after months of preparation and anxiety, brides frequently got lost in the performance. By the time the big day arrived they had forgotten what the wedding was really about.
But she is not above taking a tongue-in-cheek poke at herself, either. Poppy is anchored by Ned, in which a women flies above the world but remains connected to a man on the ground by a fine string, is a reflection of how Lorelei felt when she and husband Harold were forced to spend several months apart.
As a set designer and model maker, Harold moved to Wellington to work on the movie The Legend of Zoro. “ It was such an unusual feeling not having him here, “ says Lorelei. “It felt like I was floating, without my rock to anchor me. It was scary but also exciting.”
Phobias are something Lorelei knows about. The design graduate spent eight years training as a singer and musician but when it came to performing she suffered paralysing stage fright. Turning these feelings into paintings, Lorelei created Alice and Pearl Both Suffered From Agoraphobia, depicting a nervous woman and an equally anxious little dog, and Eugene Suffered Terribly in Front of an Audience, a small man alone on a large stage with only his giant shadow for company.
Lorelei grew up in a small town two hours’ drive inland from Melbourne where the land was flat and featureless, but she says living on the Southshore spit may also have contributed to her tendency to locate her characters in pancake-like environments.
She and Harold live in a renovated 1960s bungalow expanded to accommodate their two studios. Walk through an archway cut in a hedge and over a sand dune and you’re on the beach. In one direction are the hills of Sumner and Banks Peninsula, in the other the beach is a flat expanse stretching to the horizon. All that’s missing is a women floating in a bubble above the sea.
Lorelei’s work is sold through Fisher Galleries, ( with three galleries nationwide). Ron Epskamp, a gallery manager for Fishers, says it is the warmth and humour of her pieces that people respond to. “Even when dealing with serious issues she does it in such a way that it makes you want to laugh. Lorelei’s paintings make you feel good.”
Janine Spencer-Burford of Australian publishers the Spencer-Burford Group is equally impressed. She saw an exhibition of Lorelei’s art while visiting New Zealand and it was love at first sight. “Lorelei’s whimsical art brought a smile to my face. Women of all ages really love the characters.”
The series began as doodles. Lorelei and Harold have a blackboard on the bathroom wall, often leaving amusing messages and drawings for each other. Lorelei also whiled away quiet moments when working as a hairdresser, ( she has been a full-time artist for the last two years) by doodling fantasies of the life she’d like to live. Unsurprisingly, Edith Merleau-Ponty is a hairdresser who dreams of being an artist, and Bernard, Edith’s extremely tall husband, bears a striking resemblance to Harold.
The antics of her brother, friends and now departed cat also appear ( Frida wasn’t in their lives when the book was written but doesn’t miss out, popping up on the back of the Stationery).
What started out as an idle pastime took four years of fine tuning and rewriting before reaching publication standard, but playing with language is something Lorelei loves. The titles of her paintings add to the humour of her work and she likes to collect unusual names for future use.
Spencer-Burford hopes to release a range of stationery featuring Edith, along with further books of her adventures. The days of idle doodling to help pass the time are long gone.