Jeanne Johns to host final Heart of the Hilltowns seriesDate: 12/19/2022 CUMMINGTON – The opening reception of an art show is a community event, never more so than the night of Dec. 2 when Jeanne Johns hung up 28 portraits of her friends and neighbors for the sixth and final installment of the Heart of the Hilltowns series. A bluegrass trio plucked, wine flowed, voices mixed and all those familiar faces looked on.
Johns’ last show features several portraits from the first Heart of the Hilltowns show in 2015. The model for one of those portraits, Norma Jean Hayes, said Johns did the painting of her in Paris, when she was 20 years old. Hayes flew to Amsterdam to visit Johns, who spends half the year in the Netherlands. Together, they traveled to see the Eiffel Tower.
“Jeanne makes me think differently about how it’s possible to exist in the world,” Hayes said. “The way her art moves her through the world has been…an inspiration in my life.”
Johns painted the portrait of Hayes during that two days in Paris, The trip was formative for Hayes but grew harrowing for Johns: her son had passed away. Hayes, now 26 and a musician, was there to help Johns make it back to Cummington.
Hayes is 57 years younger than Johns, who is 83. Three of the portraits in this year’s show are also of younger people, 19, 15 and 12 years old. Johns is still not quite sure how she creates a rapport with kids, but it seems to work.
“I’m kind of amazed with myself, and with them, that they can have an open conversation with an 83-year-old woman,” Johns said. “Maybe it’s just the listening and clueing in on a couple of words, then going on from there.”
The works are ‘oil portrait/conversations’ because Johns spends as much as two hours talking with someone. She snaps lots of pictures – but what she learns about her conversation partner, through the back and forth, informs the image on the canvas.
An early model for Johns, Katy Eistman, who now manages the nonprofit Hilltown Vision, praised the way Johns uses light. For Eistman, the impressionistic style Johns paints with still leaves no doubt who the person is. The colors are nowhere near realistic, but the identities jump out at you, every person is identifiable.
“What she does is sit there with you for a couple of hours, lets you talk [and] asks you questions,” said Eistman. “She really meets you where you are,”
In the earlier years of the series Johns sometimes painted people she would never see again, who she may have run into at a local eatery. Now, she’s more selective. She also sees high value in documenting the town’s public servants. Her plan is to paint portraits of the police chief and town clerk, and possibly others.
Jeanne’s daughter-in-law, Joy Johns, serves on the Board of Assessors. Her son also served in town government.
“I did a portrait of a woman whose name is Monica. She died last summer,” Johns said. She secretly photographed Monica at work in town hall. “I used those two photos to do a portrait of her and I gave it to the community…It’s very important, I think, that it’s there.”
Johns paints on one of two easels in her living space in the home of good friend Nancy Cole. Cole, mother of one and a carpenter by trade, catered Friday’s opening as well as the birthday party of Johns’ boyfriend in the Netherlands.
“It’s inspiring. I see her painting every day,” Cole said. “It’s so nice to be around someone who appreciates all these little changes in the sky.”
Two easels ensure Johns can take advantage of the different qualities of light at various times of day. The quality of light fascinates her. In one sense, the kind of subject, an old house or a young face, isn’t so important anymore. Johns’ aesthetic, developed over many decades with the brush, teases out the emotions of a subject, emphasizes the subconscious appeal of a face or locale, and thereby reveals the timeless meaning of an image.
“The first thing I do in the morning,” Johns said, “is I look at the morning light. If it’s right, I have a painting set up to the west, which gets the sunlight from the east…which is very interesting.”
When the work is done there’s a ping pong table in the kitchen.
“She loves to play ping pong,” said housemate Karla Reinertson. “We all sit around the ping pong table, in the kitchen, and she has her coffee.”
“It’s a little hard to get to the refrigerator,” Johns said, “but we somehow manage.”
The household supports Johns and her painting, three other adults, two cats, two dogs, six chickens and six goats. The chaos creates fertile ground for recording the heart of Cummington, the people who work and live in town.
“Cummington,” said Eistman, “this reflects the community back at us, literally. [We’re] seeing our own faces through her eyes.”
The Heart of the Hilltowns VI will be up for viewing at the Cummington Community House until Dec. 31.
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