Reading Freud, 2023

Jennifer DeGroot  

Jennnifer deGroot is an oil-based, figurative painter working out of Vancouver Island. At a young age, she began creating art as a means of nurturing her blossoming sense of personal identity within the microcosm of her restrictive, religious home and social life.

Jennifer poured works of Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist artists, and began to teach herself painting technique. Through years of study, she has built a body of work that is closely informed by her personal experience. It is an exploration of sexuality, gender, and identity expression and, alternately, a clear rejection and refutation of repression.

Exaggerated skin tones contrast against starkly blank backgrounds, bringing the many facets of humanity and vulnerability in her subjects to life - a simple way to bring focus to the figure. What seems awkward, is revealed to be strong. What feels vulnerable, is secretly armor. Mundane moments of exposure become a remarkable window into the beauty of a secret life lived.  Jennifer's paintings are a celebration of the beautiful gray areas in a sometimes hard-line black & white world.