CAN YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST PIECE YOU CREATED? IF SO, WHAT WERE THE
FEELINGS WHEN YOU FINISHED!?
The first piece I remember creating was a huge painting of a
Christmas tree I did when I was 5. My teachers wanted me to sign my
name at the bottom, but I didn’t even know how to write my own name
at that age so I just wrote “JEN” in huge capital letters at the
bottom. I had probably drawn little things at that age, but I had
never done a big painting, so for me that was very eventful. My
parents framed it and put it up in our house, and every time
someone would come over they would be like “your 5 year old
daughter did this?!” I think that the feeling of having my art
displayed for everyone to see, and to be praised at such a young
age is probably why I continued to create art after that.
WHAT IS THE PROCESS THAT GOES INTO CREATING A PIECE?
It’s a very long and tedious process, something that a lot of
people don’t realize. Just prepping for a painting (choosing a
photo, buying supplies, priming the canvas, sketching the outline)
probably takes like 6 hours. After that, the actual painting
process is another 20-30 hours. I’m so meticulous and a crazy
perfectionist, and it definitely shows in my paintings. People are
always like “How do you do so much detail?!”, like there’s some
secret shortcut that I’m using , when in reality I’m literally
spending 5 hours painting a 4 inch section of canvas- that’s how I
do so much detail.
HOW DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE GROWN IN YOUR CRAFT OVER TIME SINCE
YOU’VE BEGUN?
I have definitely grown a lot as an artist. When I first started
doing oil painting portraits, I had the craziest painting
tendencies. I was so scared that my paintings would turn out badly,
or not look like the person I was trying to paint. This fear took
over and I would end up spending months on one painting. I would
literally use tiny 1 mm paint brushes to make sure that even the
tiniest details were perfect. Some people might praise my patience,
but in retrospect a lot of times this crazy OCD perfectionism would
make me resent painting. I felt like my own perfectionism was
constraining myself from truly expressing and creating freely. This
changed when I decided to start selling my art. At first, I had no
idea there was a market for prints, so I was relying solely on
selling original paintings. I figured that the only way to make a
living off of selling my art would be if I started to paint faster.
I decided to challenge myself to “speed paint,” by only allowing
myself 3-4 days for each painting. Funny enough, those speed
paintings actually turned out way better than anything I had done
before.