Different Strokes
Iveth Jalinsky‘s signature, in the lower right corner of her paintings, stands out. “It’s weird — some people think it’s like Japanese, but it’s not,” she muses. On close inspection, the letters actually spell out her last name. But stacked vertically and painted on with quick, slashing brush strokes, the Roman characters look like they’ve come from the other side of the globe.
“That’s history,” Jalinsky explains. “To be a German Jew in the 1940s, if they found you, you were gone. So the families, they wrote to each other in code.” Her family’s code was to write vertically, since they knew the Nazis would try to interpret their letters to each other by reading horizontally, left to right. That code still makes people pause when they first see Jalinsky’s work.
In one sense, there’s nothing foreign or unusual about her signature; it’s just her last name. In another sense, Jalinsky’s signature has attributes of so many different ways of writing that it has no language but its own, much like Jalinsky’s paintings. Her mosaiclike history — she was born in Colombia to Jewish German parents and now lives in Kansas — may be the source of her ability to combine commonplace materials, colors, styles, and parts of compositions in ways that make them seem unreal.
Portraits of nudes with apples line her basement — but Jalinsky has broken up the colors in the background with a knife, giving some edge to the classical subject matter. And while these background colors are vibrant and have often been applied in shiny, oil-based paints, the nudes are painted in dull, chalky neutrals. It appears as though the canvas is mostly exposed inside the outlines of the bodies, but Jalinsky has actually painted a transparent or off-white layer where she wants this effect.
Of the apple paintings, only one, “Woman Facing Away,” is included in The Power of Color at the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Library. It’s a tribute to Picasso, and the model comes from his paintings. “In his transitional stage, he loved to paint women in this position,” she says. “I love this stage in his career because not many people know about it.”
Since she began painting full-time a year and a half ago, Jalinsky’s work has been shown in Germany, Argentina, Colombia, and major U.S. cities including San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Her paintings turn up in New York City art collections, and she has been commissioned to do a mural in Tucson, Arizona. “I’ve had very good luck,” she says. “This year, I had more than 20 exhibitions. That is a lot.” She was also one of five artists selected to participate in a German exhibit honoring Charlemagne — this, too, she attributes to luck.
Still, she recognizes that her distinct way of making a solid composition out of jagged-edged, mismatched forms and colors — both artistically and culturally speaking — has caught people’s attention. “To be different, it makes people more interested in you.”
