ARTIST, DESIGNER, AND JAZZ AFICIONADO MARINE PENVERN OPENS HER EXHIBIT, BODY AND SOUL, ON FEBRUARY 18, 2023, AT HUDON HALL IN HUDSON, NEW YORK

The song “Body and Soul” was written in 1930 by composer Johnny Green and lyricists Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, and Frank Eyton. They created it for Gertrude Lawrence who introduced it to London audiences, but later in 1930 it was Libby Holman who sang it for American audiences in the Broadway revue Three’s a Crowd. In October of that year, Louis Armstrong became the first jazz musician to record what would become a jazz standard. Armstrong claimed that if one had to ask what jazz is then one would never know. “If you ain’t got it in you, you can’t blow it out,” he said. “You blows who you is.” Marine Penvern has the soul of a jazz musician but it is her exquisite body of interdisciplinary work that shows us who she is. She not only blows who that soulful person is when she plays her saxophone sitting outside her atelier on Warren Street for passersby to ponder perhaps if they have souls of their own, but also when she picks up her paint brush to stroke her portraits of others into being by being more fully herself while doing so or when she combines her scissors and thread to sew that soul of hers into the garments she conjures as if they are another of her canvasses, which in many cases they are since she also designs fabrics based on her glorious abstract art.

One of Penvern’s favorite musicians and style icons is John Coltrane who also invoked the soul when speaking of his artistry and its mission. “My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being,” he said. “When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups...I want to speak to their souls.” But it was a sentence in which he spoke of sentences themselves that speaks to Penvern’s penchant for the incongruity inherent in the impulse for her own artistry to cross-pollinate itself in order to find more deeply its pulsing interdisciplinary jazz-like rhythms. “I start in the middle of a sentence,” said Coltrane, “and move both directions at once.” That is how Penvern, poised yet pointed in more than one direction, keeps her balance as an artist with many talents. She’s got that Coltrane cadence in her artistic conjurings. Even her colors have perfect pitch.

“To me, jazz represents pure freedom and opportunity, and my artwork is an expression of that freedom,” says Penvern, who also stresses the importance of community in her life and in her art. “I moved to Hudson in 2018 after losing my community in NYC because of gentrification,” she continues. “As a Hudson resident, I am exceptionally aware of these issues in our town; with growing displacement and rapidly changing demographics it is vital that we preserve and unite the local community through art.” Her stunningly beautiful portraits of local residents in this Hudson Hall show are thus more than an assemblage of faces; they are banners of belonging. There is even a portrait of her cat named Mouse which is not only a signal of her love of artistic incongruity and her French sense of irony - her first community was in Brittany where she was raised - but also a grateful reminder to the town that this beloved companion came to her through the work of Animal Kind, the local cat rescue shelter. Indeed, when one looks into these faces she has chosen to paint to represent this community one see not only the kindness that is embedded in them but her own kindness which was the initial impulse that inspired her to capture the town’s sense of community by conjuring these portraits of its citizens and her friends. The other works in this show, Penvern’s abstract canvases, are yes, jazz-like in the rhythmically felt facets of their gem-like geometrics and their, at times, jarringly majestic asymmetries, but there is nothing abstract about Penvern’s kindness. And yet it is not the sentimental kindness found in lesser artists. Her kindness is as stark and unsparingly special as the light itself is in Hudson. There is no other light in the world like Hudson light. And Marine Penvern herself - an artist, a designer, a saxophonist, a costumer for dance companies, a mother, a member of a community, a loyal friend - is one of a kind. Her artistic disciplines are many, but hers is a singular vision.

Louis Armstrong: “A lot of cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original … never play a thing the same way twice …”

John Coltrane: “Damn the rules. It’s the feeling that counts.”

Marine Penvern: “The crux of my art is conversation and collaboration, expressing the order in improvisation. It is a way for me to find internal balance in a chaotic, unbalanced world. By finding the harmony in my art, I find harmony in myself.”