Artist / Yogini / Friend of Dogs
Jean Sanders was born in Chicago in 1966 and attended Southern Illinois University, graduating with a BFA in printmaking in 1987. Soon after, she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison and received an MFA in Printmaking in 1990. While attending graduate school she received a research assistantship and helped launch Tandem Press as a student printer. Currently, Jean is an Associate Professor of Art at Pennsylvania State University. She has been teaching printmaking for the last 18 years. During the past seven years, Jean has become highly skilled as a photogravure printer. She first learned the photogravure technique from Master Printer, Lothar Osterburg. She still periodically prints with Lothar in his Brooklyn Studio refining her understanding of this very challenging discipline.
The conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of her work are based on her years of experience as an Iyengar yoga practitioner and her beliefs in Tibetan Buddhism. Both disciplines train the practitioner to be present to each moment of inevitable change and chance that comprise the physical world. Jean’s physical world is comprised of dogs, dogs and more dogs. She has four large dogs that are often the subject of her work. A particular type of Buddhist meditation that has been an inspiration for Jean’s artwork is called Tonglin. During Tonglin, the practitioner rides the breath with her gut feeling; on the inhalation she breaths in the pain and suffering of others and on the exhalation she breaths out that which gives her great joy or pleasure. Jean’s dogs are her joy and pleasure. Their energy and motion so perfectly express the essentially unpredictable nature of material existence. Their unmediated, wholly spontaneous reactions to the world around them exist purely in the moment. It is this lesson of existing purely in the moment that Jean trys to remember, whether it be in her studio, on her yoga mat or in the day to day existence of her life.