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©2026 Gideon’s Bakery
Jennifer Coates
March 12, 2026
Volume 2
Issue 21
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Jennifer Coates: I like that painting is alchemical - that emotion and psychological charge are generated from piles of inert goo. Squishy drippy substances can be organized into pictures.
The flat bound surface of the canvas can contain space, depth, atmosphere. The physicality of paint can augment or undermine ephemerality - encrusted lumps can also be vapors.
I love to corral marks, gestures, spills; pay close attention to the edges of forms; establish an internal hierarchy, a structure that guides the eye around a place that never existed before. I love to play with positive and negative space, to flip them optically, to confuse pictorial space. I love the struggle that comes along with finding a painting. I have to keep looking, erasing, editing, obsessing until I find it. The dopamine hit of finding a painting is so delayed but always so worth it!
GB: You describe the dopamine hit of finding a painting as delayed but deeply satisfying. In a culture engineered for constant stimulation, does painting feel like resistance training for attention? What kind of patience or appetite does that delay build in you?
C: We live in an ADHD world and my brain is just as distorted as all of us by the constant stimulation. But yes, I do believe that constant quiet effort that builds hour by hour and day by day is a resistance against a technological regime that addicts our brains to gadgets, social media, the news cycle and shortens our attention spans.
I grew up playing classical violin and learned how to give myself over to practicing and slowly building skills—the payoff was my ability to play something beautiful. I’m grateful for that.
I also play tennis which is a similar slow accumulation of skills after many hundreds of hours of frustration. The flow state we can achieve after that kind of discipline, re focusing over and over and being persistent is miraculous to me. There are days that my whole body repels the idea of painting and even being in the studio but I go and push through anyway because you never know when something will click.
Especially with capitalist driven AI efficiency taking over, the inefficient work of the body, the mind in tenuous connection with the hand, seems more important than ever.
GB: On the days your whole body resists painting, how do you tell the difference between a necessary warning and ordinary friction? When do you listen, and when do you override yourself?
JC: I think I have to discern between psychic agitation and physical exhaustion. If it’s exhaustion, then take a break, it’s ok. It isn’t always easy to give myself permission to rest but I’m getting better at it.
If existential doubt, anxiety, indecision are the cause of my resistance to painting, then I try to push through. Maybe I’ll clean up the studio or organize some colored pencils just to start the process. Or put paint on the palette—saying to myself let’s just see what happens. Or lately I’ve been cutting things, making collages, reassembling pieces of old drawings, pages of old books, art postcards. Something about cutting, the directness of it, is a good antidote for my psychic agitation these days. If picking up a brush and trying to find the picture—trying to make a world—feels too hard, I like to make sure there are other studio behaviors available at any given moment.
Jennifer Coates is an artist working in Brooklyn, NY and Lakewood, PA. She is the 2021 recipient of the John Koch Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2021 NYFA Award in painting, a 2019 Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Sharpe Walentas Studio residency (2018-2019). Recent solo shows include Untitled Art Miami 2022 with High Noon, Miami, FL; Para Pastoral at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Lesser Gods of Lakewood, PA at High Noon, NYC; and Pagan Forest, West Chester University. Recent group shows include Wonderland, curated by Elizabeth Denny and Katie Alice Fitz, Aicon Gallery, New York, NY; And So Did Pleasure Take the Hand of Sorrow and They Wandered Through the Land of Joy, Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Psychedelic Landscape at Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC, and Post Pop Landscapes at Acquavella Galleries in NYC and Palm Beach, FL, curated by Todd Bradway. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, Art Critical, the Huffington Post, Smithsonian Journeys, and Art News, among other publications.