Artist Biography

Jennifer Hauser is a Chicago-based artist by calling. When she’s not distilling whimsy from visions of rollicking bunnies, she daylights as an architect. 

Her path to becoming an artist has been a bit “off trail”, it was like she needed to take a couple laps around the block before she saw art as her natural conclusion. It makes sense if you unwind her path back to the beginning. Hard work and patience are the tenants she carries with her from her childhood spent on a dairy farm. Jennifer’s attention to detail and craftsmanship are the things she gained from her education as a classical musician and architect. Her sense of humor is attributed to her affliction with an over-sized and inoperable phunny bone, a genetic mutation that runs deep in her family.  As a result, symptoms unexpectedly flare up and a ridiculous idea will manifest seemingly out of nowhere, worm its way to her frontal lobe until it escapes and finds its way out into the world much like a pimple. These incongruent qualities form the bedrock behind her distinctive style and have led her to this moment.

It’s true, Jennifer spent her childhood on the family dairy farm up in northern Wisconsin with lots of pets, farm animals and wild critters. She had to work doing a lot chores, one would think milking cows and such, but I forgot to mention she is a terrible coward. When it comes to the live stock, she was better at handling them from a distance. Instead, her disappointed father relegated her to doing the cooking and the cleaning. All the same, she learned to work hard against the backdrop of the bucolic countryside. Phase I complete, in case you are keeping track and checking any boxes.

When she grew up and became an adult (she was 18), she moved to the big city to attend college and become a classical musician. She was naïve, overly optimistic and probably under the influence of that country air. I don’t think it was a waste of her time to go to college and chase her dream of being a musician, she learned a lot about herself, the world, the arts and needing to pay the rent. That was the reality Ms. Hauser was confronted with, as many are, when she graduated from college with a degree in trumpet performance.  She needed to get a job that would pay the bills. So that’s what she did. She got a job, lots of jobs, miscellaneous jobs, like when she was a file clerk in a law firm, and that time she was an administrative assistant and caught the boss’s wife eating the candy bar out of her lunch. Those are just some of the highlights! Phase II in progress……

Oh, she also got married and had a child. It was around the time that she had her daughter when she decided to go back to school and get on a steady career path. Keep in mind, this wasn’t previously mentioned, but Jennifer did a lot of sketching, took some art classes at the local community college and learned how to make stained glass windows. The sketching and the window making were a catalyst for Jennifer’s decision to attend architecture school. She thought that was a good idea. In her mind, it was the perfect mix of art and practicality. Now, Phase II complete, check box.

Fast forward to the present day, Jennifer the artist in Chicago, actually suburbia, but close enough. Her daughter is now grown up, Jennifer is an architect and she still draws. In fact, she spends so much of her free time drawing that her husband helped her build a studio in their back yard she likes to call “Studio J”.

During her time in “Studio J”, Jennifer has completed a lot of fun and varied projects. She wrote and published a comic book, drew some portraits, dabbled in still life and built stained glass windows. Her style, medium and work has evolved over the years but what she is most known for these days are her ink and colored pencil drawings on primed masonite. 

I think we are in the middle of phase III! Jennifer frequently gets asked about how she started drawing trees and bunnies. So I will recount what she told me. It was the middle of the pandemic when we were all in quarantine. She had to turn “Studio J’ into her home office which meant she had to keep the art projects small and out of the way.  She was in the middle of writing her second comic book and she felt a little deflated. Nothing seemed quite that funny at that moment and she felt she just couldn’t continue with her book. She packed it up and put it on the shelf to wait until she felt like she could laugh again. She cleaned her studio really good and then thought, now what?  No, this must be the beginning of Phase III.

The “what” was an old photo she took on a road trip of an interesting grouping of trees. When she took the photo, she thought to herself, “One of these days, I am going to draw these trees and reinterpret them in an interesting way.” She began to draw the trees over and over. It was like a spark insider her lit up. She started drawing postcards of her weird little trees for her friends and family. Pretty soon she had quite the collection, then she draw a coloring book of trees and then the tree drawings took on a whole new life of their own. Jennifer would add little bunnies and challenge herself with more complex drawings, larger drawings, more details. The bunnies started having activities. One drawing sparked and idea for the next drawing, drawing begets drawing. And there you have it, phase III complete. Jennifer metamorphosed into an artist.

These intricately detailed drawings full of bold colors are reminiscent of her stained glass windows. The technical pens she discovered in architecture school are relics of a past era in hand drafting, but she prefers them for their line quality and for the methodical technique required when using them. Her use of masonite as a substrate points to her habits as an architect, some in the biz use the term “truth of materials”. It’s an architect thing, don’t worry about it, just remember architects like to build with precision and use great materials that will last forever. As for her subject matter, you know the trees, flower and bunnies? Those are the conjurings of her childhood, when she wasn’t running away from cows or working in the house, she imagined tiny, secret worlds full of imaginary friends.