If this artist’s bubbly palette and whimsical characters can’t cheer you up, there’s probably no hope for you. When the going gets rough, staying positive is always harder than keeping your stick wedged in the mud. I’m pretty sure Jennifer Kosharek lives her life as genuinely optimistic as she depicts Gretchen, her leading protagonist in her narratives. Meeting up at the Morean Arts Center, where she currently has work in the exhibition Paradise Cities, she came in looking like one of her brightly colored paintings, all the way down to her chartreuse cowgirl boots.
“Gretchen is based of a set of doodles I did about ten years ago. Previous to this type of work, I did a lot of oil painting that were realistic. My whole life, I had drawn everything from life or from photographs. One day I just woke up and I said, ’You know, you’re allowed to draw things out of your imagination. You can do what you want!’” Kosharek explains. “I was doing a lot of mail art at the time, so it was a way that I could do hundreds of pieces a year, mail them out, and they were off to see the world. It was very freeing. I could experiment with collage, with drawing, and developing Gretchen as an idea in my head.”
As a younger, innocent character, Gretchen seems to wander the world with a fresh, colorful look at everything around her.
“I like the idea of purity, honesty, and a childlike hope for the future. As an adult, you watch the news so you see how horrible everything is. I think that’s why people like her as a character, because it gives them hope and a little bit of happiness,” she says.
“She morphs into lots of different things. She’s always a girl, but sometimes she’s a fish, sometimes she’s a seahorse. It’s about finding yourself in everything in the world, where you appreciate things by reflecting on them. A lot of people just don’t realize the beauty in the little, everyday things,” she says.
In essence, there’s connectivity to everything around us. As a personal symbolist, each painting represents the artist in one way or another, even if she doesn’t tell people what it means.
We meander over to a painting that’s practically coated in stickers in the gallery called "Set Sail."
“This piece was inspired by Charlie, our local guy who works for the city of St. Pete. He paints gray blocks over all of the graffiti, so the background sort of represents a wall,” Kosharek says.
Many of the stickers are from Cali-based Bombit Stickers, where you can either buy or trade artist-made stickers. The point of sticker sharing is to allow your art to travel: your stickers might end up in a sketchy alley in Toyko or a bathroom in Berlin.
“This is a Shepard Fairy sticker [“Andre the Giant has a Posse”]. They actually sent me a whole pack of his stickers and I was like, ‘I don’t want to stick these, I want to keep them!’ But I had to do my duty to stick them,” she says. “These two are from Mr. SAY, who’s based out of Portland, then this is a BASK piece. He’s an awesome local artist, and someone who I look up to. The rest are my stickers.”
In a way, this piece is kind of like a collaboration of multiple artists that all have similar goals of making art for the people.
Between her piece “Sunken Beautiful,” savoring a special place she takes her son to watch the flamingos, and “Influences,” which speaks about the big inspirations in her life, Kosharek pours herself into her work. One of her most emotional pieces is “Save Yourself” (the center painting in her exhibition panorama).
“I was inspired by the girls in Africa with the ‘Bring Back our Girls’ campaign. But nobody is saving them. No one is saving out oceans, no one is saving the bees. Nobody is saving anybody these days, so everyone is left to fend for themselves,” she says. “There are a lot of horrible consequences going on, and it’s so frustrating, so this piece is about those frustrations.”
In a room full of her work, this painting is noticeably different than the others. There’s a darker feel to it with a more dulled down palette, but the brushstrokes are quicker and seemed to be fueled by emotions.
“Hearing about the girls who did save themselves, who did escape. They ran away in the middle of the night, or found a phone to call for help without anyone knowing.
"This is sort of advice for myself too: you want someone to come into your life and save you and help you out, but we’re all kind of on our own,” she says. “Once you accept that and take your life under control, it’s a little easier.”
That’s why in many of the paintings, Gretchen is her own savior. In “Sail with Me, Stay with Me,” Gretchen is transformed into a sailboat, simultaneously saving herself while escaping too.
“When I first drew her, it was a bad time in my life when I was leaving an abusive relationship. I really want her to be a symbol of motherhood and femininity, and being a loving, giving, strong woman in a world where men pretty much win at everything. I still want her to respect men, because I have three sons and I love them,” Kosharek says. “I believe life works best as a team or a family, but it’s time for the world to see women as equals and not second-class citizens.”
Practicing what she preaches, family time is cherished in her household.
“I try to paint around my kids, so if everyone’s in the kitchen, I’ll be working in the kitchen. I have teenagers, but I also have a toddler, so I have to be present. I don’t really get the chance to get too lost in my work.”
As a mother who is a painter, street artist, muralist, quilter, rag doll maker and mail artist, Kosharek is not a renaissance man, but a renaissance maker. But she’s also an entrepreneur: For three years, she ran the Eve-N-Odd Gallery on St. Pete's 600 Block.
“We really helped get that area flowing with people and art shows. People would come in to the gallery and would say, ‘I come in here on my lunch break because this place makes me feel good.’ It meant a lot, even though it was a tiny, shoebox gallery. That gallery was my life,” she says.
Though the gallery closed due to circumstances out of her control, Kosharek reminisces about one of the projects she did while there.
“At one point at my gallery, we yarn-bombed the 600 Block. Soon, more of it started appearing in St. Pete. People should continue to yarn-bomb things because you see that tree covered in a sweater and you connect to that in a weird way. It’s like street art: people connect to it. It’s another human connection,” she says.
Appreciating traditional craftwork, it’s so great to see a regeneration of knitting and crocheting. In the fine art community, craft has easily been downplayed as inferior to other forms of art, so it’s refreshing to see people take pride in their hand-skills.
“A lot of people don’t appreciate craft because it’s ‘women’s work.’ It’s ‘women’s handiwork,’ and that’s what the world thinks of it, but it’s not true,” Kosharek says. “There’s just something special about making something handmade for someone. There’s definitely a value to that, the same value that mothers have, that teachers have, and that all thankless jobs have. That’s what I’d like to do with my art, to switch the previous thoughts of craft and say, ‘This has value, these things are important.’”
To keep updated with Kosharek’s work and exhibitions, check out kosharekart.com.
Follow her on Facebook for her upcoming events at Bradenton’s “Made Here” Craft show on Oct. 21 and the MFA St. Pete’s “smARTly Dressed Boutique” on Nov. 7: facebook.com/evenoddgallery
Urban Dictionary defines Femme Fatale as “a woman with both intelligence and sex appeal that uses these skills to manipulate poor helpless men into doing what she wants. May cause death.” Keeping in line with this concept, Caitlin Albritton's "Femme Visuale" series aims to highlight local women artists and show off some lesser-known talent that's been hiding in the shadows. In the art world, if it ain't big and loud, it ain't being seen (looking at you, Koons). Art as a grand spectacle leaves little room for modest, sincere, or quiet voices, especially women's voices. And I promise, we won’t bite.
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2016.
