Nina Jerome

About the Artist

Nina Jerome Bio and Statement
A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Rhode Island School of Design, Nina Jerome has been painting landscape in Maine for over thirty years. Concentrated light, panoramic rhythms, varied points of view and active brush strokes convey her interest in unique qualities of place in both natural and constructed environments.
Jerome exhibits throughout Maine, and her work has been shown in many regional and national juried exhibits. Her paintings have been selected for fourteen public art projects through the Maine Arts Commission Percent for Art Program, among them six large-scale triptychs installed at courtroom entrances in the Penobscot Judicial Center in Bangor. She has recently retired from teaching drawing and painting at the University of Maine.

Jerome paints to capture moments when land and light interact, initially by painting underlying color on canvas and marking the surface with gestural strokes. Each mark directs the process, as she gradually aligns the work with the concept that prompted it. In painting landscape Jerome searches for a sense of place. Her subjects alternate between natural landscape and more densely populated built
environments. Within each she looks for elements of light and structure that define the unique personality of that place. While the point of view of her landscape is usually from the ground, recent work has focused on the land as seen from above.

“Making art requires that I observe my surroundings thoroughly. It invites comparisons between solid and fluid, light and shadow, tangible and intangible. Painting allows me to organize these personal observations with marks and color and to express the way that I personally see space. I work in series of paintings that examine visual variations of one place, a continuum of fleeting moments in my experience. Thus the painting process marks time and conveys my personal path and direction through the land as I witness its changes.”