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Celebration Iris
Gift of Love
Garden Goddess
Mother Earth

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ALLIE JENSEN

As a watercolorist, my work is about layers of transparency, illusion and reality. It's not a far stretch for a sparkle of light on an elegant leaf to become an emerald. It's natural for me to see the curves of a reclining nude in the ripples of a stream. The bubbles of effervescence could show up just about anywhere. Would that these -- and compositions yet to come -- open a window to a place where the elements are familiar, but not limited to a natural context, and that each be a place of light.

"Two dimensional art should be a lingering visual experience. If you are going to live with a painting you ought to like the place it takes you." I had my first art lessons at Spiva Art Center in Joplin Missouri. I think I was 9. More recently, but still a good long while ago, I studied art at the University of Tulsa and received a BS degree in art education. I didn't pick up watercolors until my last year there. I had put off the challenge for as long as possible, but there was an immediate affinity. I was drawn to the unique properties of the medium and am still fascinated with the movement of pigment in water.

When I left college, I spent some time in the schools as a visiting artist, but mostly I worked as a picture framer, or a florist, always painting during time off from my day job. I had a wonderful opportunity to design an art history curriculum for children and spent some summers teaching that as well as drawing and painting. My designation as a self employed artist is symbiotic with my dual role as the mother of four children. My studio is in a room off the kitchen, and each title makes the other possible in a lovely circular way. There are lots of circles in my work. I feed energy into my garden and the energy circles back to me in the floral images of my paintings. I find circles in nearly everything I'm painting these days.

I've been included in national watercolor shows, including Watercolor USA and the Adirondack Exhibition of American Watercolors. I think the best work, though, is yet to come.

There's so much more I want to accomplish visually, and I am grateful for newly available technologies making it possible to share my artistic journey. The relatively new print medium of giclee printing permits me to send my work into the lives of many more people affordably, yet with the highest quality reproduction possible for the watercolor medium.