Faculty
Paul Jeanes
Professor
“Artists and designers are uniquely positioned to thrive in the visually-centric 21st Century, making art and design education more timely and important than ever. My overarching aspiration as a teacher is to encourage, support, and empower students to explore their curiosities while investigating how to think through the process of making. I strive to create a positive and supportive classroom community where playful exploration and collaborative learning are of the highest importance.”Paul Jeanes is a Professor and Division Chair of the Foundation Program at Montserrat. Originally from North Carolina, Paul earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina Asheville and a Master of Fine Arts from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Prior to joining Montserrat, Paul was an administrator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Towson University.
Paul is interested in developing interdisciplinary art and design curricula and teaching courses which emphasize the notion that creative thinking and making are a synthesized process. Having developed new courses and curricula throughout his career, Paul recently led the 2020 redesign of the internationally regarded 2D, 3D, and Drawing AP Art and Design portfolio exams.
Paul maintains an active studio practice that fuses painting, drawing, photography, and installation where he investigates perceptual abstraction derived from enigmatic experiences in his everyday life. Mary McCoy wrote of Paul’s work, “Jeanes teases optical quandaries by playing mercilessly with perspective. It’s a visual conundrum that both fascinates and sets your teeth on edge. He prefers his sources to remain anonymous, and he works on a large enough scale that you feel like you could walk into one of his paintings and be lost in an hallucinatory world of shifting perspectives. Irreconcilable viewpoints implied by Jeanes’s paintings prod and probe at our settled understandings of the world we live in.”
Paul’s work has been exhibited broadly on the East Coast of the United States and is represented in both private and public collections.
Education:
BFA from University of North Carolina Asheville; MFA from Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art
Website:
www.pauljeanes.com
Learn more about the Painting concentration at Montserrat.