I WAS BORN IN MODESTO IN 1929 AS LAVIDA JUNE HUNT, AND I DREW AND PAINTED FROM THE TIME I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO HOLD A TOOL.
My mother remarried when I was five and we moved to Redding, California, where I attended school,and was fortunate in having gifted and dedicated teachers throughout my school years: they always gave extra in whatever field they taught, and I have never forgotten them.

My mother, a piano teacher, gave me music lessons and accompanied for a local dance teacher to pay for my classes with her. We performed often for clubs and schools.

I was a quiet child, loving to read and to be with my cats. The dance classes surely helped me to become more sociable, and later music lessons certainly gave me a "work habit" and a self-discipline that I feel has been essential in my art fields. Eventually even the simple ability to be alone for many hours at a time has served me well, especially my solitary day trips, from age 7 or 8, into the hills behind our house, carrying a lunch and often not returning till suppertime. Nature has always been important to me.

Gardening now helps give me the contact I need with the earth, now that camping is more difficult. One of my earliest memories is the wonder of digging up warm potato-bodies from my grandmother's garden during the Great Depression (1929=36).
ALL THESE THINGS BECAME THE BASIS FOR MY ART AND STILL APPEAR THERE. I do not paint "to express myself," but rather, to maintain contact with something far greater than myself. I follow a life thread, from work to work, and never know where it will lead me.

JENNY HUNTER GROAT has had formal training in Music, and full art lives in Modern Dance/Performance Arts,western Calligraphy, and now Painting, which she feels will be the major focus for the rest of her life. But she also makes Artist's Books, some collage, and, as she says, "I play with my friends online" in various Mail Art projects. Occasionally she writes the poetry or texts that she puts into her artwork.

She says, "It may be that I worked backwards, and should have been in the Painting world from the start, yet each of my art fields has contributed to what I do now. My paintings are a synthesis of what I've done in my first fields."

SHE FOUND HER INSPIRATIONS AT FIRST IN HER TEACHERS. She was inspired by her high school art teacher, Beatrice Kempf, who, in Groat's opinion, gave her students the equivalent of a first year art school education.

In College, she discovered Modern Dance and movement improvisation, through Marjorie B. Sheridan, which sent her into her Modern Dance career. The improvisation has been so important that she has kept it alive in each art, though she is more likely to say, "It kept my art alive."

Dancer/Artists, Welland Lathrop, Anna Halprin and Merce Cunningham have helped shape her dance work and indirectly, her painting now. The painters that have most inspired her tend to be those providing the vitality of the great Abstract-Expressionist movement. She grew to artistic maturity in San Francisco in the 1950's, immersed in the excitement of this time on both coasts and enveloped by the influences of the Golden Gate as "The Gateway to the Orient." Favorite artists are still John Saccaro,Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Pierre Soulages, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell. Earlier artists who inspire her are Van Gogh and Monet, "who thought of it all and had courage then, as do my more recent choices. Besides their courage I love them all for their boldness and gesture. There is such a thing as 'truth' in a line or gesture, and they all have had it. I strive for it."

IN THE 60'S, GROAT MADE SOME WORKS THAT PROTESTED THE VIET NAM WAR. But she has now turned away from "protest" and other "political" artworks, saying, "I am older. And I have experienced other things, too. I've now had to move on to where real answers may be found, in the hearts and spirits of us all. I want to put something positive into an essentially negative current world environment."

THE WORK COULD BE CALLED "SECOND GENERATION ABSTRACT-EXPRESSIONIST."In Calligraphic artworks, she put words into varied painterly settings, using the crafts of calligraphy in a way that crossed the line into "fine art." But after some years of doing this she tells us "I found that the WORD is so powerful that as soon as you put one word into a painting, you READ; you are more literal, and a whole world of more subtle feeling is lost. Therefore I have returned to my first kind of expression, the non-verbal, as in music and dance."

OF HER PROCESS, Groat says, "My painting process begins with painting, just as my dance theater compositions began with movement.I do not plan ahead for what will go into the painting or for what it will turn into. I am never afraid of the blank canvas, since each one begins with a dance gesture on the canvas, and that determines the feeling and direction the

Jenny Hunter Groat

1

Followers

Artworks

WIDDERSHINS (right portion of Triptych)