The Visual Song Painting

Jennifer has been called a contemporary french impressionist. She is an award-winning internationally known impressionist artist & spiritualist, gleaning inspiration from her travels, and her sacred space around her home, surrounded by animals, in the country in a small rural town in Tennessee. For the past several years, she has been in art residencies in France and India. She utilizes these exotic places to inspire new and deeper meaning in her art. Experiencing connections by seeing through the eyes of people she meets around the world help her to find auspicious things to paint. In this way, she incorporates her imagination, emotion and intuition to produce lasting moments of art. Loving life and constantly adventurous, she explores texture, lost lines, abstraction, make-believe and a little magic on canvas. Living a life of adventure she grew up on a farm in North Alabama, in an open field, with a clear view of the night stars. Constantly daydreaming about the life beyond this life and across the world. She lived most of her days outside on horseback or exploring the woods nearby, searching for fossils or arrowheads. She drew everything she could think of that started in her imagination or from life. The first artist she can recall, that influenced her was Dali. Later she got into fantasy art drawing men wrestling snakes, or women as mermaids. Poetry also crept into her art, linking the two with illustrations relating to each other. She started in pencil, pen and charcoal which remained her main medium during this time. Because of her parents love of culture, in 1982 Jennifer visited the Smithsonian and was totally mesmerized by the amount and quality of the art there. "I will never forget getting lost in the hallways as if no one else were there with me, just absorbing the art." This fascination opened up her world. Her first trip to Europe too changed her life forever. This happened in 1985, and she was still in high school. She remembers being so absorbed in the art at the Louvre, she lost track of time, and her group, almost left her; they had to come and find her. Later, her love of competition and riding horses led her to become a horse jockey, from 1987-1992. She went on training horses for another 10 years. At this time, most of her drawings were related to horses and western art. She turned her attention to gunsmithing, hoping to learn the art of engraving to put detailed images into the metal.