Live Panel: Fearless Painting

Acrylic | Watercolour | Mixed Media

Teaching is my life, paired with painting and moving through the world creatively. Working with other painters to help them identify, refine, and express their version of beautifully different or compelling is one the passions I hold most dear. As a self-taught artist of 18 years, I came about this journey of art through unique circumstances and found that it held great potential for helping me learn to connect and express how I feel about my human experiences through the incredible combination of paint, pigment, and paper.

When I knew I needed a style I didn’t have an academic program, professor, or mentor to help me understand how to develop that, so I turned inward and committed a year to studying and defining what gives an artist their ‘style.’ That was the most important year of my life professionally because it equipped me with understanding the head space, skills, and heart connection that every artist needs to curate their own visual language and use it to express a narrative of their choice.

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Oil | Watercolour | Mixed Media

Jean is the author of “Expressive Portraits: Creative Methods for Painting People”. She has been painting for over twenty years, balancing her strong teaching abilities, and writing with her continuing aspiration to convey her ideas in visual form.

Jean’s traditional practice includes referential imagery of people, still life, landscape and abstraction. The layering of a variety of media offers Jean an assortment of possibilities within her work; quality of edge, line and texture all play a role within her imagery. Although Pederson is well known for her mastery of watercolours, mixed media has become an important venue for her creative expression.

The portraits in her paintings are based on people who she has met or impacted her. These subjects in her paintings often reflect different walks of life as well as diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. We are hard pressed to find a period in time when the human figure wasn’t represented. Finding a way to express the human figure in a language that reflects the twenty-first century is perhaps the greatest challenge in figurative work today.

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