About Jennifer Anderson:

Anderson is a painter & printmaker working in many disciplines. Her iconic and evocative imagery arises from her experiences as a woman and a mother, as well as her love of the natural world. Jennifer has taught various printmaking workshops atSitka since 2017, created the Roosevelt Elk artwork for the 2019 merchandise, and has been a part of the Sitka Art Invitational for the past three years.

Jennifer Anderson shares this with us:

Keeping sketchbooks has been a major component of my art practice since my college days. Like many art students, filling sketchbooks was oftentimes required for a drawing course. I fell in love with the process of recording anything and everything – and loved that the content wasn’t assignment-related. My books became very personal art journals, and I held them close. But there is something about a book that causes people to want to look at it, and so I taught myself to write backwards – and if I did share, my exposure was limited (or at least I liked to think so).

Fast forward to my days of carving out an art career – in the middle of raising a family, of course. My sketchbooks were at times the only place I made art. I had the mindset, ‘at least I’m drawing something!’ and again, I held the pages dear as they also contained scribbled notes about my children, my future artist dreams and musings. Throughout my Family Phase, I was a fairly active Printmaker – and it was in my sketchbooks that I would work out imagery and compositions for woodcuts, etchings and lithographs. As a family, sketchbooks were a constant – it was rare that a birthday or holiday would pass without the gift of a lovely new volume. Filling sketchbooks became a family pastime, including books we would take along on camping trips and travel.

Fast forward, again, to my more recent years – my family has graduated from me and in this New Phase I am embracing my time to make art with a passion. As always, the sketchbooks are my go-to where I kickstart ideas, practice working out the neck of a heron, focus on the form of an owl, or test some color mixing. My books are truly the catalyst and inspiration for my watercolors, printmaking pieces and oil paintings. A recent gallery exhibit at the Carmel Art Association existed of 20 new oil paintings, all directly inspired from my artbook pages. As a companion to this solo show, I published my first artbook, Natural Inclinations – Pages from an Artist’s Journal, a visual volume of selected pages from my collections of sketchbooks and art journals.

I hope you’ll enjoy the video below where I discuss my favorite materials, describe how I explore different mediums in my books, share my inspirations and offer you a peek into my creative practice.