Artist Statement

b. 1970, Fort Bragg, North Carolina

As a child, Jennifer spent lots of time drawing and although she discovered her grandmother’s oil paints when she was eleven, Jennifer did not begin to paint seriously until 2002.   Up until that point she was on a quest to do sociopolitical international work.   Jennifer completed a Ph.D. in sociology in 2001 from the University of Texas at Austin.  Graduate school came and went replete with repeated introspection.  Although she met academic challenges, she longed for creative expression. The highlight of her doctoral education was the completion of an anthropological study on human migration in Chiapas, Mexico where she lived for a little under a year.  Still feeling uncertain about her path, Jennifer remained in Austin and worked doing socioeconomic research and population analyses following graduate school.   It was not until August of 2001 that she would embrace her passion, to be a painter. 

In August of 2001, Jennifer spent a month in Spain, France, and Italy.  Bouncing from museum to museum, she finally saw masterpieces that she had previously only seen in books, masterpieces that would become her inspiration.  While online in an internet café in Marseilles, France, she enrolled in an informal painting class at the University of Texas.  There began her painting career. 

Jennifer began to paint everything she saw.  Everything was beautiful.  Everything was painting-worthy.  Mundane things became beautiful when brought to the canvas.  She painted reality to see what could become beautiful when rendered in paint.  She read of Renaissance and modern painting, purposeful brushstrokes and decidedly invisible brushstrokes.  Jennifer has found some of her inspiration in such painters as Lucian Freud, John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper and Odd Nerdrum.  While exploring diverse methods of combining color and manipulating light and shadow, she recognized that part of what has driven her to paint is the psychological impact painting has on all of us.  She strives to evoke such feeling in her own work.

Jennifer has taken classes at Laguna Gloria Art School, the Austin Fine Arts School and most recently at the Art Students League in Denver.   She currently paints in her studio at home and in life painting groups. 

Statement

Painting is anything but a silent medium for me.   The psychological impact that a painted canvas has on me invokes an internal dialogue.   One of my missions as an artist is to create the illusion of dynamic three-dimensionality on a static two-dimensional surface.   I try to interplay color and brushwork in order to generate vibrancy that almost moves on the page.  

I like to not only create a story out of content but to use my paint & brush strokes to create an overall feeling of movement.  My main character may be the one who is the focal point, the one in motion, but her environment is as significant as she is in creating that feeling.  She is a part of her atmosphere.  I like to inspire the feeling of all matter and particles organic or not to be interacting on the canvas---continually bumping into one another like subatomic particles.  My vision as a painter is to combine technique and visual narrative to create the illusion that the story on the page is alive, that it vibrates. 

These days I find myself moving more into the surreal.   I am intrigued with transferring psychological imagery to the canvas, that which is brought on by social pressures.  My paintings lately reflect a solitude, a feeling of isolation where one begins to think her thoughts are distinct and bizarre and wonders if there is anyone else that can relate to these thoughts -- I hear this is the curse of the human condition.