Biography
Jenna Crouse (b. 1998, Medford, OR) is an artist currently based in Wichita, KS. She focused on printmaking, specifically etching, to earn her BFA from Hendrix College in Conway, AR in 2020 before earning her MS in Education from Fort Hays State University in Hays, KS in 2023. Currently, Jenna is working on her second masters degree in Studio Art, focusing on painting and drawing, at Maharishi International University, where she will graduate in 2027. Jenna spends her time sketching, teaching/ practicing yoga, taking care of her two dogs, Ruby and Otis, as well as her bearded dragon, Mushu. Recently, Jenna has become very obsessed with writing/ receiving letters, and is considering getting a PO box to start an art mail club.
Artist Statement
I draw/paint to connect with and closely observe my materials, subjects, the environment, and myself. My work reflects my paying close attention to what is changing: my own state of mind, the light, the time, and the environment. I feel a gravitational pull towards large-scale paintings and drawings because I love to draw huge things in tiny spaces, getting my whole body involved in the drawing process. Filling the entire drawing is important. I feel a compulsion towards fullness and treating every corner as an active space. Leaving any empty space seems dishonest, like it ignores lived experience. Charcoal, as well as oil paint, are specifically beautiful and forgiving mediums. Technically, charcoal is malleable and has a wide tonal range, but more deeply, charcoal is a painterly medium that allows for experimentation, constant revision, and movement. The initial sketch or the beginning of a drawing is 99% of the time completely inaccurate, so my drawings evolve through repeated observation over time, continuously returning to the same spot to renegotiate special relationships. My work records duration, reconsideration, and shifting perception in this way. It is not about copying reality. Rather, it is the act of engaging in an ongoing negotiation with perception, memory, and time.
My repeated drawings of familiar interiors connect to my interest in changing light and emotional spaces as well as recurring spaces. I think about Jennifer Bartlett’s ‘24 hours’ works in relation to this idea. Our spaces are constantly changing, and documentation of these lived-in spaces is very interesting.
In the Spring of 2026, I went through training to become a Yoga teacher, and there are so many parallels between the practices of Yoga, meditation, and drawing; all are practices of presence, awareness, embodiment, and attention. Drawing specifically is a way of becoming conscious through sustained looking.
This is where the bid for connection comes in I think – I want to be so present in a space that my rendering of it is somewhere the viewer and I can meet, a place where conversations can be had, and you can feel seen. My paintings and drawings are active attempts to reach another person and connect with them. This is attempted and achieved on many levels, meaning my art is in conversation with the world around me, my physical environment/the people around me/my community, but it is also in conversation across time with other artists I feel connected to: Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Larry Madrigal, Mary Cassatt, and Jennifer Bartlett. I look at their work and feel the same bid for connection; I hear them asking the same question: Can we meet here?
