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Jennifer Jaeger
was born in Taiwan in 1956 as Lanhwa Cheng. The oldest of four
children, she grew up in a small military village on the outskirts of
Taipei. Her family valued education, and the mother took on side-work
at night so that the children could complete their schooling.
Lanhwa and her
two younger brothers proved early on to be gifted artists and they won
many prizes—at first in their classes, then in their schools, and then
in citywide competitions in Taipei. The three drew constantly on old
newspapers that they found lying about. Lanhwa became interested in
watercolor, so she would bring home discarded paintings from school,
soak off the pigment, and paint new images. The shadows of the
underwash that remained, she says, would peek through her new paintings
like ghosts. |
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When she was 23,
Lanhwa married Robert Jaeger, moved to the United States, and took the
name of Jennifer. The couple eventually settled in a small town near
San Francisco. She began studying under renowned teachers, like Frank
Sidesko, Charles Reid, Robert Wade, and Michael Loffredo. She also
immersed herself in art history, studying countless art books and
visiting art museums throughout the world to see the works of the great
masters firsthand. She especially admired Henri Matisse for his sense
of color and composition, Pablo Picasso for his skill at drawing, and
Chaim Soutine for his loose and innovative style.
As her skills
evolved, Jaeger’s work came to draw on the ideas of twentieth-century
French modernism, especially the work of Matisse and Pierre Bonnard.
Like them, her work is characterized by confident drawing and intense,
rich colors.
Perhaps as a
legacy of the thrifty habits she learned in childhood, Jaeger sometimes
“kills” her paintings, repainting over them in order to reuse the
canvas. Her stirring
Self Portrait
(2002), for example, has several earlier works underneath. It was
common for the old masters to paint over their failed compositions, but
few modern artists do this since it makes the colors a little muddy.
But Jaeger likes seeing the faint shadows of earlier paintings in some
of her works. She thinks it adds texture and complexity. |
