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 translate the emotional quality of an experience. I’m interested in capturing something like an unexpected feeling that sneaks up on you. This could be something witnessed out of the corner of the eye or half-remembered. Or it could be a deeply felt experience of paying close attention to a particular thing.
The artists that influence me are constantly changing. To name a few: Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Nicolas de Stael, David Hockney, Etel Adnan, Catherine Murphy, Milton Avery, Francis Davison. I learn from them all.
My process in creating work includes looking, sketching, making many paintings of various sizes, sketching more from those paintings and re-working. I primarily work in oil paint, but also graphite, ink, water media, digital media, and sometimes cut and torn paper as the need arises.