Jane Shoenfeld

Jane Shoenfeld moved to Santa Fe in 1987. She chose the endless space of North Central New Mexico over New York City’s grid. Shoenfeld grew up in the DC area and when it came time to go to college, decided on Pratt Institute, both for it’s location and because she got scholarships there.  She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Pratt and also studied painting at a graduate level at Brooklyn College. 

Since the early 80’s, Shoenfeld’s primary medium has been pastel.   Her imaginative pastel paintings reflect both her trust in the unconscious as source and her lifelong love of nature. Shoenfeld’s recent body of work is based on merging images of chamisa with images of her own face.

In Shoenfeld’s words: “From my studio door, I see several large chamisas.  This scrubby plant, also known as rabbit bush,  grows in erratic umbrella shaped clusters, branching in unpredictable directions.  I claim flexibility and unpredictability as part of my own nature. Chamisa displays all its life stages simultaneously.  The dense black branches at the base are its skeleton that reveals its time here on earth.  Its silvery shoots fill with sap and turn pale green in summer displaying creative engagement with every season.  Dried branches emerge erratically from the clusters.  These clusters, left over from another year’s reproductive cycle, strike a beautiful emphasis amid the twiggy mass of shrub. I admire rabbit bush’s willingness to reveal itself.”

In this recent series, Shoenfeld, grounded in chamisa, explores her relationships with nature and her own impermanence as she ages. Her goal is to merge the structural with the magical. She has returned to careful observation as a primary source. 

In NYC, When she worked at a psychiatric hospital, she came home at night and grounded herself by studying the still life.  Then for many years, while she worked in response to poetry, she explored saturated color and abstraction. Color’s emotional impact remains central for Shoenfeld, but her palette has lightened up in recent years.

This palette, developed in response to the shimmery chamisa, darkens at night when she works on  “The Insomnia Series.”  A few of these small mixed media paintings are included here. She creates insomnia paintings on top of abandoned watercolors that are piled in a corner of the studio.  Awake, while her household sleeps, she works more in the manner of the abstract expressionists and let’s her hand lead. 

Shoenfeld is also a lover of poetry. Her work includes a series in response to poems about climate change and a collection of pastel paintings based on Yeats’ classic 22 line poem “The Second Coming.” Subsidized residencies at The Virginia Center for Creative Arts and at Jentel Arts in Wyoming were invaluable in developing and completing these bodies of work.  

Shoenfeld’s “Second Coming” pastels were displayed in a major exhibit at the Visual Arts Center in the Santa Fe Community College in 2022. In 2023, through NM Arts in Public Places, a suite of three pastels were chosen by The University of NM Hospital for their new hospital tower. Recently her work has been curated into exhibits in the midwest and in the NYC area. In January/February of 2024 her pastels of chamisa were featured in a two person exhibit with Katherine Meyers at The HERE Gallery, Santa Fe. In March 2024, an exhibition of sixteen of Shoenfeld’s pastels were exhibited through Gallery with A Cause, a benefit for the New Mexico Cancer Center in Albuquerque, NM.  

Jane organized and taught residential workshops at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM for 30 years and taught art therapy and creative process for 15 years at the former College of Santa Fe. Although no longer part of academia, Jane thoroughly enjoys teaching landscape painting in the spring and summer. One of favorite places to work en plein air is along The Arroyo Chamisa Trail near her home in Santa Fe. 

Shoenfeld’s pastels were exhibited through the First Street Gallery in NYC for many years.