Oakland Drops Beats - Penny Harncharnvej: Visual Artist

Meet, Penny Harncharnvej

She is installing and exhibiting her newest body of work themed, Beauty and Botanicals for our downstairs show. 

Artist Statement

Penny Harncharnvej's artwork has a distinctly playful character. Birds flying under water, fish swimming through stones, faces emerging from still objects to chatter with themselves... the natural order of life is left to gleeful neglect, as if life were living itself differently, so that the viewer may organize the world from scratch. The visual cues spell out strange and delightful mysteries, mystery that does not demand resolution but delights us as we mingle with it.

Cats are a frequent subject for Penny Harncharnvej. The fondness of feline paintings revolves around the prism that they offer us between our own world. The domestication of these animals have made their actions and behavior obvious to how we understand them. However, being animals, they are still in connection with the instinctive and intuitive. This has been a mixed blessing for the feline in human culture, at one time elevating them to divine creatures (as with ancient Egypt,) and at other times debasing them as familiars of witches (as with the witch hunts of England and Colonial America.

The artwork from Penny Harncharnvej brings the viewpoint closer to the cats, furthering along the continuum between these animals and humans. Moving the lens toward the animal world allows the intuitive quality of sense to be conceived in art in much more coarse, visceral fashion. Because the cat is a domesticated animal, and a friend, their actions are transparent to us. Cats are symbolic of her feelings. Cat fanciers see their pets as being intimate friends. The closeness of cats to humans makes them a bridge between that which we understand and that which we don’t understand. 

-(http://www.pennyartgallery.com/artist_statement)

For more information about Penny Harncharnvej's art work and artistic journey, please check out her website: http://www.pennyartgallery.com

EVENT: https://www.facebook.com/events/1526457564269046