About the Artist
Jenny Elizabeth is classical fine artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She creates oil paintings, drawings, and sculptures in Classical and Realism styles. She is best known for her skilled application using the Flemish and Venetian techniques for her oil paintings, which she refers to as the “Flemetian” method.
Her process is one of exploring dualities as she seeks understanding and meaning. This can be seen in her using highly technical and time consuming methods as a means of addressing the chaotic immediacy of human emotions.
Duality also appears in the way she combines realism and symbolism to examine themes such as nature and ancient architecture, male and female, trauma and compassion, and the ever-changing passage of time and the permanence of love.
(clockwise from top left) Tabernacles in exhibit | Unnamed | viewing Finding Moments of Grace | Finding Moments of Grace | Transition
Biography
Self Portrait
Jenny Elizabeth was born in Logan, Utah and raised in New England and Utah, living at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. The mountains have been her home and sanctuary since she was a little girl. She is frequently skiing, hiking, or just sitting amongst the trees, daydreaming.
Jenny is a symbolist and often combines still-life, architecture, and figures in her paintings, exploring the history and delicate existential relationship between nature, culture, and society, in relation to the individual. This is a constant theme in her work that stems from her own life experiences and from working with individuals who have experienced lifelong trauma.
Jenny earned a Bachelor of Arts in Illustration from Utah Valley University. At the same time, she attended the Carl Bloch Academy of Art started by William Whitaker and Patrick Devonas which focused on the classical methods of painting. And, she apprenticed with Patrick Devonas, focusing on the Flemish and Venetian methods of painting.
She then earned a Master’s degree in Art Therapy and Counseling. Her thesis was based on classical painting methods - “Cast Drawing and The Reduction of Cognitive Distortion: Using a Classical Realism Teaching Method as a Psychoeducational Art Therapy Intervention."
Jenny lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has exhibited in museums and galleries, and has won many awards, including winning finalist in the landscape category from the 2013 Art Renewal Center International Competition for her oil painting, “Tabernacles”.
Jenny has traveled across Europe to research art, architecture, and history, and she has taught workshops and private lessons on the classical painting methods - both in the states and abroad.
Artist Statement
A flow of time; past, present, and future, exist in a simulacrum, imprinting all living things, forever on this earth. Life rotates on a wheel of simulation, with ages passing, humanity creating, and all dissolving again and again into time never ending.
I feel deeply and I understand that life is vastly complex. My classical art training with its slow and methodical methods, my work as a trauma psychotherapist, and my own life experiences, are combined with symbolism in my paintings and sculptures.
Symbolism helps me to express my emotions and thoughts concerning this life, and my lifelong struggle of trying to make sense of it. It allows me to be private as I process my experiences, at the same time giving to others the opportunity to be curious and reflect on their thoughts and emotions that pertain to their own life.
I only truly feel at peace in nature and in ancient architectural ruins. The confusion of the world is drowned out in the beauty and melancholy that both are infused with. Beauty because of the birth of new things that nature brings and melancholy due to the entropy of ruins.
When I close my eyes, I can see and feel the souls of people who have created and lived in these ruins. I feel their pain and their joy. It is my constant thought to acknowledge all those that have lived. Maybe it is through this, that I want to acknowledge that my own life has meaning and value – that I am seen.
In my need to make peace with this wheel of simulation and humanity, I often combine nature, still life, ruins, and at times people in my art. I am compelled to create a story of deep meaning that will remain in my art, to speak for myself and others, when I dissolve into time never ending - like so many have done before.
(clockwise from top left) Kellan - Shards of Time | Life and Loss | Tragic Flaw | Unnamed | Simulacrum I | The Silencing | (center) Virtus
The emotions and thoughts of the ages are, at all times present in my mind and hence in the pieces that I paint. A flow of time; past, present and future give attention to those who have been, are, and will be.
