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I create the paintings I do because they give me an experience I want to have. For me painting is a process of exploration, of seeing what might happen next if…I change this color, apply this line, move this shape. It is a movement from the known, an idea or vision or tone, to the unknown. Working this way puts me in a liminal, in-between, state where anything might happen. With its roots in Latin, liminality suggests a threshold or doorway, a place of crossing and discovery.  And transformation.

The notion of transformation has propelled me through an early career in painting, a deep dive into medical writing, a decade of working with mentally and physically ill individuals living without homes, another as a body therapist in hospitals and hospices, five years in a refugee resettlement program and now, again, painting full time.

In the studio I work on several paintings at once and my studio walls are always full of paintings that, over time, influence each other.  Current work focuses on the relationship of light and dark in the shifting shapes of water, rain, clouds and land. Each painting carries a history of accumulated layers and intuitive discovery.  I tend to use my hands as much as brushes to apply oil paint, metal leaf and other media. In aiming to follow the spirit of painting, I leave the finished work unframed so the viewer might imagine what is happening beyond the edge of the painting.

~ Jeanne Toal ~

Jeanne Toal was born in California and raised in Nevada where she spent her child and young adulthood absorbing the subtle beauty of the high desert.  Intrigued by the vastness of the landscape and the quality of the light, she began a painting practice that ended when she moved to the California coast where nothing 'excited her eye." After a long and diverse career in human services, she moved north to Port Townsend where, once again, painting absorbs her interest.  She works in a small studio surrounded by trees and her paintings reflect the changing atmospheres of forest and water.