Jenn Hallgren

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Jenn Hallgren works with oil to create contemporary landscapes, gardenscapes, botanicals & florals, cityscapes and still-lifes, using bold, beautiful color choices.

“While I paint many different subjects, the landscape is my first and greatest love. For me, what is essential about the landscape is its complexity. I look at the natural world and I see utter chaos — a jumble of colors and forms that mesh together so one can barely perceive reality, but with continued observation, the forms disintegrate into fragments of color in space. It is this essential dualistic complexity in nature that I try to capture in paint”. — Jenn Hallgren

Jenn was born in St. Louis and currently spends her time between Philadelphia, PA and her family farm in Palmyra, MO. After graduating from college with her BFA, Jenn spent 15-years in Graphic Design and Art Direction before returning full-time to painting in 2017.

While Jenn’s imagery is often based on the natural world, the true focus of her paintings lie in the formalist aesthetics of oil paint — line, color, shape, form, structure, composition, and the plasticity of the two-dimensional surface. The act of painting and the language of formalism guide Jenn in her practice, and the continual challenge of capturing the complexity and chaos of the world in plastic terms is what keeps her striving to achieve a higher level with her work.

Jenn is most inspired by Cézanne. While she finds his late paintings brilliant, she looks more at the progression of his life in his continued pursuit of painting. Her early paintings, much like Cézanne’s, were naïve and rather clunky. Today, Jenn gauges her progression to his mid-life progression, which helps keep her focused not only on how far she has come, but also on which paths she may strive toward in the future.

To Jenn, painting is everything! She doesn’t view painting as recreation or therapy, and it’s not a way to force my political views or to prove what a rebel she is. It is intense creative work, and it is one of the most challenging things she has ever done!

During the last 30 years, the one thing that Jenn has come to realize is that the more fluent she becomes in the language of painting, the further her objectives shift and the more illusive are her goals. Painting has become the driving force of Jenn’s life, and she can’t think of a single more challenging — or a more rewarding — way to spend her days.