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Artist sought to communicate environmental issues
Jen Trute • 1960-2011

North County-based artist Jen Trute, with her oil-on-linen painting “Madonna of the Salton Sea.”

A lot of work went into Jen Trute’s paintings. She didn’t just come up with something, sketch it out and pick some colors. She read reams on painting techniques and environmental issues, she discussed and accepted critiques of her works-in-progress from collaborating artists, and she still looked for ways to improve them once they were “finished.”

“She was passionate about painting in the best way possible. She read volumes and volumes, and she studied art, especially Old Master techniques,” said Dennis Paul Batt, a longtime friend and fellow artist. “She approached her art like a scientist.”

Ms. Trute died of breast cancer July 23 at her home in Carlsbad. She was 51.

Jennifer Sullivan Trute was born May 22, 1960, in Springfield, Mass., and was the oldest of three children. She attended the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston from 1978 to 1983, and then pursued a successful career in commercial art, according to a 2007 story in The San Diego Union-Tribune. She worked on storyboards for companies in Boston, New York, Seattle and Southern California, where she settled in the mid-1990s. In 2000, it was time for her fine artist side to take over.

“Art just had to get out,” she said in the story. “There was no escaping it. It was exciting, but financially, it was scary.”

She tried painting portraits, but there wasn’t enough demand. She and her husband at the time eventually divorced after her switch from commercial to fine art, and she later met and moved in with Batt in 2001. He recalled her collaborative spirit, generosity and love of nature and the environment.

Naomi Nussbaum was a close friend of Ms. Trute’s and is also an art consultant who heads the nonprofit Synergy Art Foundation in Solana Beach, which provides grants to artists who need financial assistance, including those with illnesses. Nussbaum described Ms. Trute as someone who spent months researching an environmental issue before depicting it in a painting, and who was unafraid to confront the truth in her own symbolic language. Combining that passion and level of research with her classical training is what made her such a fine artist, Nussbaum said.

Ms. Trute also felt an urgency about communicating environmental issues through her art, said Janell Cannon, an illustrator and children’s book author who was a close friend of Ms. Trute’s. She wasn’t protesting or waving signs, Cannon said, but she used her knowledge and dark sense of humor to express her views.

Her environmentally conscious oil paintings earned her awards and were exhibited in various galleries and museums, including the San Diego Natural History Museum, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, San Diego Art Institute’s Museum of the Living Artist and the Oceanside Museum of Art. She also served on the board of the San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild and had her work featured in a number of publications.

Always the perfectionist, Ms. Trute continued to seek constructive critiques of her work.

“The last painting she completed … she said, ‘Don’t you think I need to fix the highlights?’ And, ‘Don’t you think I need to change that?’ ” Nussbaum recalled. “She knew what she wanted, and she did not stop until she got it.”

Ms. Trute is survived by a brother, David Trute Jr., of Guilford, Vt., and a sister, Mary Trute of Seattle.

A memorial exhibition will be held at Noel-Baza Fine Art, 2165 India St., San Diego, in September. The opening will be from 2 to 7 p.m. Sept. 3, and the exhibition will continue through Sept. 24. Her work is still featured on her website, jentrute.com.

Written by
Lisa Deaderick

12:44 p.m., Aug. 5, 2011

Thursday, Jul 28, 2011

Canvassed | San Diego art & culture

Jen Trute memorial show at Noel-Baza Fine Art

A tribute exhibition for a talented San Diego painter who recently lost her battle to cancer

By Kinsee Morlan

"Coral" by Jen Trute

In "Coral," one of San Diego artist Jen Trute's large, detailed oil paintings, an aloof-looking woman sits in a nice armchair with a cup of tea set on an elegant end table nearby, apparently unaware that she's underwater and surrounded by a coral reef, a lion fish and other sea creatures.

The painting is impeccable and aesthetically interesting in its own right, but when you sit down to learn more about Trute and her surrealistic work, the piece's significance increases by leaps and bounds.

"These pieces are about the oceans becoming more acidic and lower in oxygen levels," Trute writes about "Coral," just one of her paintings in her recent "Oceans Away" series. "The increased CO2 in the atmosphere dissolves in the water and becomes carbonic acid, which is threatening to dissolve corals and creatures with shells. Coral reefs that die out look bleached and colorless. Plankton die-off contributes to ocean dead zones that lack sufficient oxygen to sustain most sea life."

For the last nine years, Trute has been working on environmentally-themed paintings with the hopes of raising awareness and inspiring progress. According to friends, she put the finishing touches on her last-ever painting a few months ago. Last week, she lost her decade-long battle with cancer and passed away on Saturday at the age of 51.

"Jen approached art like a scientist," said fellow artist and close friend Dennis Paul Batt over the phone today. "She was incredibly technical and had these highly refined techniques.... Among her peers, she was the Michael Jordan in this league. She was the best of the best."

"Shay Davis was over here earlier because Jen donated her art supplies to local artists," Batt continued. "And he was just staring at her work. It really is just amazing. She had the ability to capture expression, that's very difficult to do and she could do it."

A memorial exhibition for Trute will be held at Noel-Baza Fine Art, 2164 India St., in Little Italy with an opening reception from 2 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 3. The exhibition will run through Sept. 24. A showing of Trute's work is also scheduled at the Oceanside Museum of Art in September 2012.

Here's an excerpt from the obituary, written by Trute's friend, Janell Cannon:

"Jennifer 'Jen' Trute, an American fine artist, who was known for her environmentally conscientious oil paintings, passed away at the age of 51 on Saturday, July 23.

Born May 22, 1960 in Springfield, Massachusetts, she followed an innate artistic vision throughout her life. As a child, her love of nature and fascination with its beauty inspired steady practice of drawing and painting. Educated at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, from 1978-1983, she majored in painting and graphic design. She freelanced as a graphic designer and illustrator in Boston and San Francisco until 1989 when she started specializing in storyboard and comp advertising illustration. While living in New York, Seattle and then El Cajon, she worked for various ad agencies in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Orange County.

Tuersday, Jan 20, 2009

Elevating the underground

A high-end art museum opens a lowbrow art show

By Kinsee Morlan

Jen Trute's Sunbathe Barbie at Bombay Beach"

“This is disgusting—appalling—not art—more porno—ad nauseam!” The words came at him like tiny daggers flying straight into his eyeballs.

Gross, a movie producer and artist known for designing the Ghostbusters logo, set the note down, then picked up the phone and called most of the nine artists in the show.

“One of the artists suggested we get it blown up and hang it in the museum!” he mused between chuckles in his New York-cynic sort of way.

If it were any other museum show, the artists probably wouldn’t have been so amused by the seething Post-it, but if Mary Fleener, Scott Saw, Tim McCormick, Scrojo, Jason Sherry, Charles Glaubitz, Ron Wharton, Pamela Jaeger and Jen Trute have one thing in common, it’s a lack of pretension and an elevated sense of humor...

An opening reception for Lowbrow Art: Nine San Diego Pop Surrealists will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 24, at the Oceanside Museum of Art, 704 Pier View Way. Admission is $10. The show will be on view through May 24.

INTO VIEW

Jen Trute, the reluctant painter

Carlsbad resident turned back on commercial career

because the art 'just had to get out'

By Robert L. Pincus

UNION-TRIBUNE ART CRITIC

January 20, 2008

When Jen Trute was an art student living in Boston, she was visiting the venerable Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum one day and was looking at Rembrandt's "Self-Portrait, Age 23" (1629).

"I felt an incredible sense of weight on my shoulders," she recalls. "I felt as if I understood the kind of isolation that would have gone into creating something like that and I knew I wasn't ready for it."

As a student at the nearby Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, she expressed that same ambivalence about committing to a life as a painter. Trute shifted back and forth from an emphasis on fine art to commercial art during her time there.

When she left in 1983, after five or so years of study, she pursued a successful career in the commercial arena that took her from Boston to New York to Seattle and ultimately to Southern California. Her specialty was storyboards for advertisements.

By 2000, she was convinced she was ready to leave storyboards behind. Or maybe it's more accurate to say she couldn't deny the painter in her any longer.

"Art just had to get out," she recalls. "There was no escaping it. It was exciting, but financially, it was scary".

She points to a breakthrough surreal painting, "Sarah and Her Demons," a canvas done in the meticulous style she is still honing. A woman poses in a kitchen chair, looking unperturbed. Sarah doesn't notice the demon by her side. A twin demon is standing on the kitchen table, devouring the cereal from the box.

In an oblique way, you sense this painting is about Trute too, trying to stave off dramatic forces within. She had taken a stab at being a portrait painter beginning in the mid-1990s, while still working as a storyboard artist, but found there wasn't enough demand for such work.

Trute simply knew there were paintings she had to make and she painted the first of her pictures fusing surreal imagery with a dark look at our relationship with nature. The pretty woman in "Nature and the Mammal" cradles baskets of flowers in one arm and grips a spine with a skull in the other. She is surrounded by text, which includes these words: "The mammal was done / Amused nature turned away / The planet was still."

In the more recent paintings, she's eliminated textual commentary and honed her skills as both a maker of dramatic narrative images and a painter.

Her life changed dramatically, too, with her decision to become an artist. Her husband opposed her decision to abandon a career in commercial art and they eventually divorced. She then left behind their home in El Cajon and took up residence in North County.

"Just last week, I was looking at a Rembrandt at the Norton Simon Museum. And I was stunned by the sense of depth in the painting." JEN TRUTE

Trute has a combined studio/live-in space in Carlsbad now and for six years fellow artist Dennis Paul Batt has been her companion.

Though there is an unmistakable surrealist strain to her paintings, she's more apt to spend time looking at Old Masters than Dali or Magritte.

"I love working out the details. I love looking at old paintings. Just last week, I was looking at a Rembrandt at the Norton Simon Museum. And I was stunned by the sense of depth in the painting."

Having risked everything to create these paintings, she has found the response gratifying. This year alone, she was chosen by Elizabeth Armstrong, former senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and current deputy director of programs at the Orange County Museum of Art, for the 2007 Juried Exhibition at Carlsbad's Cannon Art Gallery. And from the artists in that show, the Cannon's director, Karen McGuire, selected her as one of four artists to be featured more broadly in its 2007 Invitational Exhibition.

Just as important, she says, is the thought that surfaces every now and then, like a voice in her head, while she's in the studio: "This is what I'm supposed to be doing."

Cannon takes a up-close look at four artists for art invitational

North County Times: Thursday, November 1, 2007 by Patricia Morris Buckley

... This year the artists chosen are David Adey of Imperial Beach, Gerrrit Greve of Cardiff, Lee Puffer of San Diego and Jen Trute of Carlsbad. Their Works range from mixed media and painting to sculpture and ceramics.

"What's interesting this year is that each of the artists is distinct from each other," she said. "All four have decidedly differnet styles."

For instance, Trute is a painter who has a hyper-realistic style, where reality and fantasy come together.

"Her underlying theme is the environment," said McGuire. "Her works have symbols in them that refer to what is happening with the endangered animal and environments."....

 

 

The San Diego Union Tribune: Thursday, December 27, 2007 by Robert L. Pincus

... Surrealism is fundemental to Trute's paintings, too. They possess the look of dark dreams.

Trute's work, for all of its visual outlandishness, is grounded in social realities. There is no mall to speak of in "Megamall" -- only a sign for one. The landscape, drenched in harsh light, stretches out behind a girl with garish green skin and ravaged flesh on her arms. Posing with her is a fox, a mouse dangling from his teeth. It's a vivid nightmare projection of the future -- with a landscape ruined by rapacious commercial sprawl. All of her paintings are so precisely realized that you can't help but be drawn in by her darkly visionary view of past, present and future....

.. .The Life and Art of Jen Trute: November 13, 2007

Nature Talk Radio: hosted by Sidney Wildesmith

 

North County Times: Thursday, November 13, 2003 by Patricia Morris Buckley

As the reputation for the Oceanside Museum of Art's regional art show spreads, here's an interesting fact: It's actually getting smaller. Just look at the numbers:
Number of submissions: 607
Number of selected works: 33
Number of artists included: 20

It's not often that an event brags that it's getting better by getting smaller, but that's exactly what's happened with this show, which makes its third annual appearance this weekend.

"We had more applicants this year, but fewer were selected," said Irv Simpson, curator of the show, a member of the museum board and of the exhibition department. "But the jurors were more selective, so we're showing fewer works."

The jurors for "OMA Regional 3" included Mark Quint, director of the Quint Gallery in La Jolla, Reesey Shaw, director of the Lux Institute in Encinitas; and Tina Yapelli, director of the University Gallery at San Diego State University.

"It's hard to get inside the minds of the jurors, but I think they were going for something fresh, a newer trend. It looks like they were trying to push a new agenda."

The term that best describes this show, which is mostly oil paintings, is realistic surrealism." One of the paintings that best exemplifies this genre is "Sarah and Her Demons" by Oceanside artist Jennifer S. Baker (since this article was published the name has been changed to Jennifer S. Trute). The painting depicts a woman sitting at her kitchen table while little brown winged monsters are climbing around her. One is even eating a box of cereal at her elbow.

"It's a painting that presents an everyday situation in an unusual way," said Simpson, an Oceanside resident. "Jennifer is a portrait artist and that shows in her work, bit it reaches the viewer on a visceral level."

Realistic surrealism is something that's gaining momentum in the art world. "It's an interesting trend that's becoming popular in the gallery scene," said Simpson.

Including local artists, whether they're well known or not, in that trend is a wonderful way for the museum to do what it does best- expose viewers to talented artists.

"I think that the museum is gaining a reputation throughout the region," he said. "more and more, artists are excited to be part of this show. There's no doubt we have a lot of talent in this community. Our job is to stretch out our arms to these artists."

While the exhibit features fewer works this year, the quality has certainly taken such an impressive step up that art lovers are sure to appreciate it even more.

"It's a really exciting show," said Simpson. "I think that viewers will come away pleased and excited by what they've seen."

 

Surrealistic paintings go before the jury

 

The Coast News: November 27, 2003 by Ben Frumin

Oceanside- Jennifer Baker (since this article was published the name has been changed to Jennifer S. Trute) spent most of her adult life as a commercial artist before making the venturous leap into a career as an independent painter three years ago. Now in her first major North County showing, the buzz is all about Baker at OMA Regional 3, Oceanside Museum of Art's third annual juried exhibition of local artists. Baker has two paintings featured in the exhibition of 33 original works completed within the last two years by 20 regional artists.

Though comprising largely of oil on canvas, the exhibition also includes sculpture, graphics, prints, drawings, and acrylic and watercolor paintings, providing a broad window into recent trends in contemporary art.

Irv Simpson, curator of the show, described the exhibit generally as "realistic surrealism."
"There are six to eight paintings in the surrealist style, but the artists make them come off as realistic," said Simpson. "Like Jennifer Baker, who uses her portraiture skills to paint realistically in a new direction."

"I always refer to myself as a surrealist painter," Baker, 43, said. "(Salavador) Dali's work was incredibly realistic and he put a lot of different strange elements together to make realism surrealistic. Mine has a cartoon element to some of it. I think realistic surrealism is a pretty good name for this type of work, and I think it's interesting that it's getting some sort of recognition in galleries."

Baker's "Enviroscape #12- Megamall" portrays a sad, eroding green woman holding a fox cub in the foreground of a modern American wasteland. Baker said she was inspired to do the painting after she read about kit foxes in Bakersfield, Calif. That were being pushed out of their homes for expanding developments.

"I read about foxes being crushed by bulldozers, eating antifreeze, dying horrible deaths because they get into poison," Baker said. "And I just thought, 'This is terrible. I ought to do a painting about this.' The green girl represents nature, and she's obviously very decayed and sick, and in a way she's kind of confronting the viewer. The liffle kit foxes around her are sick. The landscape is like a futuristic Mojave Desert scene. There's a reference to our rampant consumerism. I just wanted it to look very disturbing."

Baker succeeds in eliciting disturbed reactions from the painting's viewers. "That green one, I think it's very good," said Encinitas resident Bertha Fasack as she warily surveyed "Enviroscape." "But I wouldn't hang it in my home."

Perhaps the most provocative piece in the exhibit is Baker's "Sarah and her Demons," portraying a tranquil woman in her otherwise normal kitchen, keeping company with two marooned-winged demons.

"I like the combination of what you might think about something and what really is," said Vista resident Michael Pultz, as he sized up "Sarah." "It makes you think life's like a joke."

Even the conservative patrons who were turned off by much of the edgy surrealism seemed intrigued by Baker's work. "When I look at a painting, I like to know what I'm seeing." Said Encinitas resident Louise Weiss. "I don't like to use my imagination like the artist does. But I like the demons. I've never seen anything like it before."

Though the exhibition seemed popular with most, some of the gallery's patrons were put off by the surrealistic imagery and mood. "In one word, disappointing" said 82-year-old Encinitas resident John Morawetz. "There's not much to look at, and what there is, isn't worth looking at."

Pointing to a modernistic menage of wood, metal, plastic and paint, Morawetz said, "Somebody picked this up at a garage sale or a trash heap.

"But some of them are marvelous," Morawetz continued, pointing to "Sarah." "This one here I like a great deal. It shows real ability."

Baker remains tight-lipped on the deeper meaning of "Sarah." "I like to leave the meaning of that one open to interpretation for the viewer." She said. "I had my own reason for painting it, which I'll keep to myself."

Each of Baker's paintings in OMA Regional 3 took her several months to complete. "I'm trying to improve my speed," she said, "I did a lot of experimentation on each piece, and that was part of the reason they took so long. I experimented with different mediums, types of oils, pastels and paints, working wet on wet, and working with glazes."

Baker spent years as a commercial artist, illustrating storyboards and painting portraits across the United States , before settling in Oceanside to make the full-time leap into the creative realm.

"Three years ago I started doing my own paintings," Baker said. "I'm one of these commercial artists who have transitioned into fine art. At a certain point, like a lot of artists, you find you just have to do your own work. You just can't stifle it anymore. "I know so many creative people who work in the commercial fields now," she said. "They do it because they have to. It's the dream of all these people to be doing fine art. But it's a market driven world we live in."

OMA Regional 3 opened with a preview reception on Nov. 15. More than 600 attendants had a chance to rub elbows with the artists over hors d'oeuvres. The exhibit's 33 works will be shown until Jan. 4.

The field of 33 was chosen from 607 pieces submitted by 199 regional artists. The final artwork was selected by a three member jury that included Mark Quint, director of the Quint Gallery, La Jolla; Reesey Shaw, director of the Lux Institute, Encinitas; and Tina Yapelli, director of the University Gallery, San Diego State University.

This year's exhibition boasts more applicants than its predecessors, though fewer were selected. Works were picked to achieve a cohesive and overarching presentation of complementary feeling, theme and mood. "After the jury members visited the gallery space, I think they were very clear about what they had in mind," said Simpson.

"We feel that we want this museum to be supported at all levels," Simpson continued. "We want the city of Oceanside to be behind us. These jury selected exhibitions reach out to the community and include them in our mission. We feel that with so many applications, we are gathering support and reaching out to the many talented artists in our community."

The Oceanside Museum of Art is located at 704 Pier View Way in downtown Oceanside. Museum hours are 10am to 4 pm. www.oma-online.org.