Bio:
Jennifer paints from life, from nature, and from the heart, exploring the link between color and emotion. Her favorite subjects are the unexpected color relationships in everyday objects or those that are unique to a particular place or memory.
Her work is characterized by strong color and an earnest, searching, and unpolished quality. Jennifer loves to paint while she travels and to create larger studio works from those experiences. In addition to regional painting trips in the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, she has worked abroad in France, Italy and most recently Cambodia and Vietnam. While much art today strives for a sense of realism, Jennifer uses reality as a springboard to another place.
Native to the Pacific Northwest, Jennifer resides in Olympia, Washington. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a focus in oil painting from Ohio Wesleyan University.
Artist Statement:
My paintings are meant to hold the essential emotional quality of an experience. I’m interested in painting something like a brief feeling that sneaks up on you when you don’t expect it; like something witnessed out of the corner of the eye or half-remembered, but deeply felt. My hope is that this will somehow be transmitted to the viewer-- personal and most likely changed, but with opportunity for fresh discovery.
Artists of greatest influence to me are those who create powerful emotional responses with intentional, thoughtful handling of their medium and who are continually adapting and learning from life. To name a few: Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, Frank Auerbach, Chaim Soutine, Giorgio Morandi, Lois Dodd, Barbara Rae, Edouard Vuillard, Nicolas de Stael, J.M.W. Turner and David Hockney (painters) as well as Ryan Adams, Patty Griffin, Tom Waits, and Hozier (song writers). There are many others.
My process in creating work often includes looking, sketching, making many paintings of various sizes, sketching more and re-working. But none of these steps matter unless there’s feeling embedded in the process. On some occasions, if the feeling is a powerful enough driver, the painting happens all at once.
I primarily work in oil paint, but also graphite, ink, water media, digital media, and sometimes cut and torn paper as the need arises.