Good Morning Gloucester

Spotlight on Jen Moltoni

Originally from Maine and now settled in Melrose, Jen Moltoni is a collage artist whose images are created using hand-painted paper and photographs. Jen loves color and the ocean, and is inspired by both. She makes a point of traveling to the North Shore at least once a week to take a walk on one of the many lovely beaches and to find inspiration for her work. Jen is a relatively new member of the Rocky Neck Art Colony, and this will be her first Holiday Art and Fine Craft Festival.

Although never formally trained, Jen has always enjoyed painting, and would create collages for fun when she was in High School. “I remember being obsessed with perfume bottles. I didn’t actually own any fancy perfume, and I didn’t wish that I had some. It was more about the different shapes and colors of the bottles themselves. I would look through magazines, and every time there was a new perfume ad, I would cut out the picture and attach it to one of the walls in my bedroom. By the time I went off to college, I had a space on my wall that was about 3’x3’, and it was covered with tiny pictures of perfume bottles. I loved figuring out how they would fit together best. My rule was that I could not use the same perfume bottle picture twice.”

“I do the same thing with the collages that I do now. The difference is that I don’t start off with a specific shape or color or texture. I figure that out as I go. I also make rules with the photographs that I cut up sometimes, just to make it interesting. For example, if I want to have the ocean in one of my collages, I can’t use cut up pieces of a photograph of the ocean to re-create that. I can use anything –pieces of a sky or tree photo, painted paper, but NOT a picture of the ocean. Silly (sometimes broken) rules. It’s fun.” As a busy mom who works full time at a local university, it can be difficult to carve out time for being creative, but Jen has worked hard to make her artwork a priority. “As a parent I’ve found that it can be difficult to find time for myself. However, once I committed to having certain times during the week that were dedicated to giving myself permission to be creative, I found that overall the quality of my life improved noticeably. Painting and doing collages is something that makes me happy, and being happy is making me a better parent.”

You can follow Jen’s work on her blog: http://jenmoltoni.blogspot.com/, and look for more of her work at The Cultural Center at Rocky Neck, 6 Wonson Street, East Gloucester during the Rocky Neck Holiday Art & Fine Crafts Festival

Saturdays and Sundays, Noon-4 PM

November 30 – December 29

http://www.rockyneckartcolony.org/winter.php

E.J. Lefavour