Art on the Walls

The New Deal Cafe provides a venue for local artists to exhibit and sell their work. We have a showroom and glass display cases, and every other month new artwork is featured. Join us at a reception to meet the creative talent behind the next exhibit.

If you’re an artist, we’d love to talk to you about having a show at the cafe.

The cafe’s art exhibits are mounted by the New Deal Cafe Art Committee and sponsored by the Friends of New Deal Cafe Arts with support from Prince George’s County. Your tax-deductible donation to FONDCA supports art at the cafe.

March – April 2014

Jenny Chau will be showing her artwork in the back room of the cafe during March and April 2014. There will be a public reception for this exhibit on Sunday, March 30, from 7-9pm.

Jenny Chau

Artwork by Jenny Chau

Producing art reveals and releases a part of you that there is no way to express otherwise. Jenny Chau has been creating and experimenting with art since 1998. Chau has not had formal advanced studies or training in art beyond high school studio courses. Rather, she has continued out of the sheer enjoyment that the hours and months of working on a piece has brought. She began with various wet and dry mediums to canvas/illustrate dark matters – thoughts and emotions that invoke depth of thought in those who view her work. Pencil and ink on paper has been her focus for years while dabbing in acrylics, water colors, and oils along the way. The precision afforded by the sharpened point of a pencil or ink pen on a dry surface allows her to sculpt creative ideas into intricate artwork. Salvador Dali remains her favorite artist, with extreme abstractionism and – out of your mind – dreamworld concepts in his work. It is the perfect blend of detailed abstractionism with color, curves, and oddities that Jenny feels she also personifies with her own style.

Staying true to precision, she has transitioned to the use of colored pencils, oil pastels, and chalk pastels along with ink. She continues to produce abstract compositions spawned out of disjointed concepts in her mind. Chau rarely creates drafts or experiments with an idea before progressing it through to completion. She commits and just lets things fly. It is with any artist – that explaining how and when you create your work – is an impossibility. The only thing that is certain is that when a piece is finished, she knows that it is finished. It is this freedom and mystery, which art affords that motivates her to continue the pursuit of that next bright idea.

Chau’s exhibition at the New Deal Cafe, starting on March 4, 2014, is all about medium partitions – ink+ink, colored pencil+ink, and pastel+chalk. The pieces fall into one of those three medium types and provide a good representation of where she has been and where she will go with her art. Doodles, for example, is a color pencil and ink piece that Chau recently finished, that started with 4 swirling lines and ended in an explosion of color, intrigue, and what-ifs. Enjoy the show!