Spring — Fresco: 

Wet Pigments on Wet Lime plaster (Italian slaked lime/ Carrara marble powder) Savon de Marseilles with
Bee’s Wax
Size: 10”x10“ wood panel framed
​Year: 2025

The Process Informs Me: 
The Creative Expression and Artistry of  Jeanette Luchese
An Essay by Ted Fullerton, ​2024

Creativity and the creative process, that exists as both intuitive and acquired, is an enigmatic entity. For the artist acquired and intuitive knowledge can exist in unison or at odds with each other allowing a dialogue or conversation of creative significance. Intuitive knowledge is sourced from an instinctive and penetrating time held experience while obtained without recourse to conscious reasoning or need of an explanation. Acquired knowledge, that is both cognitive and skill based, is founded and resourced within a relative timeline, a learned and applied ideal or skill.
 
Immanuel Kant
Intuition without ideas are blind, and ideas without intuition are empty.
 
I have observed Jeanette Luchese for many years as a passionate creative individual and artist. Her strong sense of design, based upon years as a graphic designer, and her engagement and dedication as a visual artist, fused with a fervent commitment of self expression, is a merging of acquired and intuitive visual depth. Whether she is working in drawing, painting, printmaking or sculpture her creative expression is guided by a profound visual understanding while allowing herself to be consumed by the arresting and intuitive guide of process. A passion to express an idea informs her while she instinctively is guided by materials and their application resulting in a visual “abstract” of a heartfelt and deeply personal narrative that can be shared with anyone who chooses to engage. Her passion and interest with materials is undaunted, perhaps fuelled by her Italian roots and its time held history? She refuses not to be “side lined” by an unknown and “jumps in” with both feet - sink or swim - always staying “afloat” - quickly moving to a significant and confident “stroke”. I have, on the odd occasion, witnessed Jeanette fully engaged within the creative process. With a distinctive idea or “vision” that she wants to express she “goes within herself” were she “becomes” with materials, process, concept and idea - a single creative force tempered by “seasoned” skill and a knowledge foundation while allowing intuition to surface from the unconscious to inform her.
 
Jeanette’s visual expression traverses from abstraction to and from “snippets” of emotive representative experiences fuelled by the significance of colour and expressive gestures that move towards a symbolic interpretation. How we choose to look at her work is how we perceive it “to be”. That is clearly indicated and understood by her and expressed within her artist statement: A practice rooted in materiality and emotions driven by an interest in the deception in perception: the contrast between what “is seen” and what is understood.
 
Within her most recent sojourn into the time held art form of traditional historical fresco techniques, she brings a contemporary lens of abstraction.  Having been “enlightened” from two relatively recent trips to Italy she states; finding a new footing/foundation within my heritage and culture - a forever memory of standing within the Chapel of Giotto frescos in Padua in 2019. It is clear that “connecting” with her Italian heritage as a first generation Italian Canadian is significant as a sensory gathering and bond with an aspect of a “cultural tradition”. Having experienced and seen how this medium - fresco’s - respond within the “Italian light” she is intent and driven on capturing a contemporary expression of a time held medium within the “Canadian light” to be “enlightened” anew with the merging of the present with the past.
 
What stands out to me is how Jeanette is able to maintain a visual expressive statement of “immediacy” with a medium that requires a certain amount of application “restraint”. The process requires pigment to be mixed with room temperature water and is applied on a thin layer of wet, fresh plaster. Because of the chemical makeup of the plaster, a binder is not required, as the pigment mixed solely with the water will sink into the wet plaster which in turn becomes the medium holding the pigment. As indicated, it is a medium that somewhat defies, “expressive immediacy”. However, Jeanette is able to overcome this tedious process where her passionate and expressive method of working, that is both intuitive and “acquired” results in a unique and personal visual expression, matched only by her paintings, were image and medium are aligned and experienced “anew”. 
 
Within Jeanette’s artist statement she professes, “In the perfect here and the complete now, I respond to life, to living”. It is without question that Jeanette adheres to her own declaration of living and expressing that experience in a unique, visceral, visual statement while the process - of life and the breadth of creative expression - informs her.