Jenny’s Story

Jenny​ was a remarkably creative and inspirational spirit. As an artist, she reinvented herself several times over. Her creative endeavors were eclectic: dancer, book artist, painter, educator, calligrapher.  

Jenny’s first career was as a dancer, studying with Anna Halprin and then teaching dance at Reed College in Portland.  In 1961 she founded her own dance studio, Dance West, in San Francisco and went on to choreograph for the Actor’s Workshop and the Carmel Bach Festival.

Then she shifted creative gears, studied calligraphy at Reed College, and quickly became a well-known calligrapher, taking commissions and teaching workshops around the United States and Canada. Her work in calligraphy led to an interest in creating art books, and one of them, A Vision, is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., while another, Beauty and the Beast, is in the collection of the Humanities Resource Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

With her spontaneity of line and movement, Jenny brought the sensibilities of a dancer to her painting and calligraphy. She performed a dance in the Festschrift produced for Lloyd Reynolds in 1966.

She once said, “It may be that I worked backwards, and should have been in the painting world from the start, yet each of my art fields has contributed to what I do now. My paintings are a synthesis of what I’ve done in my first fields.”

Jenny’s artwork and her teaching reflected her deep interest in nature, Jungian psychology, and Zen Buddhism. She was ordained as a Zen monk. 

Jenny said, “My painting process begins with painting, just as my dance theater compositions began with movement. I do not plan ahead for what will go into the painting or for what it will turn into. I am never afraid of the blank canvas, since each one begins with a dance gesture.”

Compiled from an article by June Maffin of Scribes Memorial on Facebook and an article on saatchiart.com