Jean Behnke

I am an artist and teacher working in and out of a broad range of material and impulse.

Jean Behnke, printmaker and sculptor investigates a figurative/geographic hybrid as inseparable from environmental condition. Behnke creates drawings on paper by overlaying shapes and personifications, utilizing world maps and combined materials.

Interested in the process of reclamation, her recent work overlays personal narrative by attaching made and acquired imagery and by drawing figures into plain gesso on vintage maps.

Curating a group exhibition at IMA on San Juan Island she says, “In a melancholic way, this art celebrates the incorrigible tangle of a wild nature pushing through internal and external orderliness with beautiful tenacity. As in the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez there is a sense of the wild that is saturated with nature's heartiness and its reality as original home.” These thoughts seem to consistently inform my art making.

Jean Behnke lives and works at her studio on Lopez Island, WA. Her spatially inspired sculpture is installation oriented using various combined materials and her two dimensional work produces experimental prints and drawings. Jean is a graduate of Cornish College and has a Master’s degree in Ceramics from UTSA. She has fabricated several public projects and has exhibited nationally for over 30 years. Her work has been reviewed in Artweek and Art in America. Jean was included in an exhibit at the Hunt Gallery at Webster University in St. Louis and curated an exhibit for the Island Museum of Art in 2007. She has served on the 911 Media Arts Center Board in Seattle since 2007. In December 2008, Jean launched Anchor art space in Anacortes, WA exhibiting the work of Northwest artists and beyond.