J. Wren Supak, Artist

Hello everyone! This is Jackson and welcome to the ninth interview for my blog, 3 Art Questions With Jackson. This time I interviewed J. Wren Supak. She is a very talented artist. I have met her and she is really nice. Thank you for reading! Let me know what you think!



Jackson: How old were you when you first became really interested in art?


Wren: I cannot remember not being interested in making art. I thought I was a Master Abstractor as a toddler. I thought I could play the violin, dance and play piano like a virtuoso, and I wasn’t embarrassed or anything, I felt proud and confident.… Now I feel like a kid with only so much to learn. Funny, hm? 


Jackson: How do you get the ideas for your paintings? Mine just seem to pop out of my brain.


Wren: I read and research history, stories, feelings and memory, and try to imagine what those things would look like if I could not use words or anything, but I could only SHOW the concept. I ask myself what does so and so look like? And then I try to create that picture— I try to show not tell an idea.


Jackson: If you could meet any artist, who would it be and why?


Wren: I am an avid art historian as well as artist and I commune with my favorite artists by studying their paintings, process, biographies, and of course doing studies of their work. I feel that they are my friends and that I am their friends. They’re my heroes. I would like to hang out with so many artists, including; Hilma af Klint about why she kept her abstract paintings and why she kept her abstractions a secret, Georgia O’Keeffe and look at her earliest experiments with ink abstractions, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, JMW Turner, James Whistler to look at Nocturne in Gold together, my Australian grandfather who played a dozen instruments, who died before I met him, Alfred Stieglitz to talk about Equivalents, some writers I admire, musicians, designers, etc., etc., etc., I could literally just go on and on. But I narrowed it down to someone I might actually meet in person someday. I choose Megan Walch. I have studied her work, her style and her process on-line, but I would like to see it in person, truly I would like to study with her for a chunk of time. She works in Tasmania, we have corresponded several times, from way over there, through digital communication, she helped me through a creative block on a painting or two. I think I could learn a lot from working with her.