Creative Matters with Jennie de Groot

Jennie De Groot is a contemporary painter living near Hamilton in the Waikato.

Jennie's oil paintings occupy a space where reality, imagination and memory all hold equal tenancy. These psychological landscapes hold the tension between realism and abstraction, place and non-place. Her status as immigrant informs her work, exploring themes of identity and adaptation.

After studying archeology, a career in travel consultancy, moving to New Zealand from South Africa and then contracting a serious infection at the age of 39, amongst many other things, Jennie finally devoted herself to her art practice at the age of 40.

In this awesome episode, Jennie talks about how her landscape paintings reflect more of a feeling, an idea and are often more about self than an actual place. She talks about being in the state of flow and how music contributes to this, how she thinks of herself as a colourist, how she builds her colour palette and how she creates balance in her work. Also the different surfaces she likes to paint on and the mark making tools she loves to use. We talk about her amazing Cold Comfort and her Figures in Space series and how and why these paintings came about.

We talk about what she loves about painting plein air, why she went back to university in her fifties to gain her masters in fine arts and how that has contributed to her art practice and what she gains from her mentor relationship and friendship with fellow NZ artist Di Tocker, who will also be on the podcast later this year. And we touch on so much more.