For Olympia artist Jenn Kliese, her art is about the creative process

Jenn Kliese’s “The Oregon Coast,” the cover art on this weekend’s Arts Walk map, depicts a lush forest floor beneath an abstract arrangement of trees and sky.

The play of light on the plants and the saturated colors filling the spaces between branches and sky evoke a sense of a place that’s at once a Northwest landscape and a space of imagination.

“My whole thing is about landscape,” Kliese said. “It’s about place, whether it’s imagined or not, or just about the feeling of being in a place.”

The piece evokes stained glass — and that’s part of what appealed to the jury that chose Kliese to create the cover image.

“For me, there was something almost sacred about the way she created the space between the branches,” said Doyle Fanning, who created the art for the last map cover and served on the jury for 2016. “It’s like when you see a really beautiful piece of stained glass in a church, and you look up and see the light coming through.”

That resemblance came about by chance, the artist said.

“I look at it, and it’s like, ‘Oh, it looks like stained glass, and that’s neat. The forest is like a cathedral,’ ” she said. “But that wasn’t my intent. It’s just the way my brain perceives things — the weirdness of my brain on paper.”

Following her own “weirdness” has led Kliese and her work in many directions. In recent years, she has done a lot of drawing using colored pencils and sometimes pastels on kraft paper. (She started with brown paper bags, in fact, because it seemed a low-risk way to experiment.) She calls the work pencil paintings, because she’s interested in working with saturated color, as a painter does.

But she also does art quilting, and some of that is on display at her studio in the Olympia Knitting Mills, home to an artists’ collective that she initiated.

She also makes music. Kliese has collaborated with Mirah and Phil Elvrum, among others, and makes music she describes as “soundtracks for other worlds” under the name Metal Machine Muzak.

Kliese also designed her own tiny house and another for her partner Kim Langston.

If Kliese doesn’t sound like a serious artist, perhaps that’s because art to her is not a career or even an avocation. It’s a way of life.

“I’ve been a creative person as long as I’ve been alive,” she said. “The medium is sort of inconsequential. It’s about the process of creating and expressing something, developing something from my mind and having it come out into physical form or into music.

“It’s always been the way that I think about the world and my life.”

And she’s very serious about that — whatever form it takes.

She chose to live in a tiny house so she could reduce her work schedule to part time. She does graphic design for the Olympia Food Co-op.

Her reduced living expenses allowed her money to rent the studio and the time to spend there — 10 hours a week or so. But when she’s there, she’s not necessarily working on any particular project.

“Making things is what makes me feel happy and sane in the world, and it’s something that gets me to connect back into myself,” she said. “The world is a very busy and sometimes complicated place, and anything that I can do to simplify my life and make it so that I can have more time to reconnect back into myself makes me a happier, healthier person.”

Before she downsized her personal possessions, she said, “I spent more time cleaning, organizing and procuring than I did just living.”

This story was originally published April 20, 2016 at 8:15 PM with the headline "For Olympia artist Jenn Kliese, her art is about the creative process."