Detail from “Poppies” by Jenny Field
From an early age, she wanted her life to be in the arts…
Maine Township, Minnesota artist Jenny Field is one of the most well recognized and prolific artists in Otter Tail County. From a very early age, Field wanted her life to be in the arts. She has not veered from this childhood aspiration. “From my earliest memories of life being raised in a large family on a hard working dairy farm in Star Lake Township, Minnesota, to my current life as a full time artist, still loving the Otter Tail County area: creating has been my voice, my strength, my life line, my catharsis.”
Her passion for art and 20+ years of work with color mixing can be seen in every piece she produces, and her unique expressionistic style has a ubiquitous presence throughout the Otter Tail County lakes area.
Field began her art career in her late teens, while attending her first years of college. She would sell commissioned pencil portraits during this time to help pay for her studies in commercial art and graphic design.
After college, she combined her newly learned skills with her innate creativity to create her own business: Blue Dragonfly Art. She found that it was difficult at that time to make a living for herself and her infant son by selling her art.
She undertook a myriad of other creative endeavors to provide for herself and her son including decorative wall art, painting furniture, teaching art classes, painting commissions and murals for homes, museums, and businesses, doing art festivals, and opening and managing an arts and antiques business in the lakes area.
Throughout all of this, Jenny was honing her artistic skill, developing her own expressionistic style, and creating breathtaking paintings. In May of 2000, her oil painting Jake’s Ladder was chosen from many juried entries to represent the Spring Gala "Metamorphosis" at the Plains Art Museum. Since then, Jenny has cultivated her style, and become one of the most recognized artists of our region.
Her body of work is a collection of works of self-expression intended to stir a visual dialogue about human emotion, evoked through a spectrum of color and subject manner. Ms. Field creates paintings to “individually stand on their own as objects of contemplation, symbolism, and to evoke occasional questions … for the viewer.”
As this article is about to publish, Jenny’s exhibit titled “Possibilities of Vivid” is on display at the Spirit Room in Fargo for just a few more days, through September 29. To learn more about Jenny Field’s art, follow her on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/jennyfieldart.
This blog post is a slightly edited version of an article written by Jacinta Macheel Zens and originally published in High Plains Reader, March 2016. Jacinta currently spearheads LRAC’s Arts Resource Experts Program, a pilot project of LRAC. This program is focused on connecting individual artists to metro-based arts organizations that can help further their careers. To learn more about this program specifically for artists of west central Minnesota, visit: https://lrac4.org/arts-resource-experts.
To learn more about artist opportunities, follow the Arts Resource Experts on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/LRAC.RESOURCES.
