Welcome to jenniferdamas.com. I am a professional artist and a San Francisco Bay Area native. I currently live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My work is especially guided by a desire to play with the formal tensions between the deliberate and the accidental. I am compelled by the allure of surfaces that have been accidentally marked, and am generally very interested in the accumulations of layers, veils of color, drips, texture, and scratches that come with time, usage and decay. It is this interest that informs my dislike of paintbrushes, my preference for the trowel, for rags and the brayer. I want my paintings to contain marks that I know are deliberately chosen for the way they contribute to the total composition, but which appear to be purely accidental. It is in finding harmony among these elements that I find beauty and mystery.

The bulk of my inspiration comes from experiences of just looking and noticing during everyday life, including such concentrated experiences of looking as going to the flea market, the state fair, the aquarium, or any other contained space where one’s agenda becomes simply to look at everything with a very open-ended curiosity. I am always looking at everything around me, to the point where I sometimes embarrass myself by pointing out so many things that catch my attention. Often I imagine the stories that go along with the objects I see. At yard sales I love to be regaled with stories of the previous lives, uses and histories of the objects for sale. I find these stories enlivening and enriching, perhaps because I come from a family that really values a good story. These experiences inform my work by way of analogy. In a sense I recreate this kind of experience by making my paintings. The enjoyment of my work comes from a similar accumulation of visible signs of life, incident and accident, where every mark and detail is a forensic record of the drama of my own experience with the materials. In each layer of my paintings I can see the story of their development and the way that they were made.