Prefer to read instead of listen? Here’s the longer version of what we talked about:

She’s always been into art. When she was three, she drew a picture of a circus with a lion sitting on top of a stand, and on the back of the paper she drew the back of the lion. Her father was both confused and impressed. She would take the paper bags from the grocery store and make things like a paper car with tin foil.

She was always an attention-getter because she was the youngest in her family. The first musical she ever saw was Godspell. She would sing the whole song and do the whole dance at home. She also went into New York City with her grandmother to see shows, and was in a choir. She moved around a lot when she was young so it was hard to get involved in shows in school. In 10th grade, she signed up for a theatre workshop and was able to sing and act various parts in the show. Then she and her mother moved to Maine, and she was in her senior show, “The Boyfriend,” where the kids who could sing were in the ensemble and the kids who didn’t usually get a turn were cast as the leads.

She went to Emerson College and was accepted to the B.F.A. program, but found many of the teachers to be arrogant. Jennifer had childhood epilepsy, and one of her teachers was worried that she might have a seizure on stage! So she didn’t have a great time being in the theatre program there and switched to a Communications Major. Once she had kids, she didn’t really have much time for theatre.

She had been doing a lot of sketching. She took an art class in 4th-6th grades at the Carnegie Mellon Museum of Natural History and Fine Art, and the instructor chose 6 kids to draw on canvas next to him each time. The last year, they no longer did that, so she roamed around the museum instead exploring the exhibits.

She joined a group at her church in Hingham where most members were working on sewing projects, and she decided to paint instead – birdhouses and wooden projects. They sold their crafts to make money for the church. She’s too impatient to focus on one thing, so she tried painting a lot of different things like bags and white gardener gloves. This is when she started really painting a lot, always whimsical and cartoonish. She started branching out to other subjects.

She didn’t really think about selling her stuff until one year at the church, when someone introduced her to a woman as “a fellow artist.” The woman heard she hadn’t gone to art school, and told her that she wasn’t a real artist.

“I kinda think that people who are artists, with whatever medium, whether it’s theatre or artwork or dance or whatever, I think there’s a modicum of low self-esteem, because any time somebody says something that’s not nice, it just sticks with you.”

It took years for her to overcome this comment.

Finally, Cinzy Lavin (musical theatre composer and playwright in Hull, MA), invited Jennifer to be in her new show, in the part of a coyote, then a rabbit, and multiple other parts in the same show. When she did the art and scenery for Hull Performing Arts, she thinks this was when she felt okay calling herself an artist. She thinks people have gotten a lot of joy from looking at the scenery she created in her front yard (a carousel, the Paragon Park gateway, and more!).

Because of the pandemic, she wanted to start making money from her work, but had to figure out how to scan her cartoons, get them on disc, and get them sent to be copyrighted by the Library of Congress. If she put it in a book as a manuscript, then she would own the whole book and sell it off piecemeal, instead of submitting individual work to different publications. The paper she was using was a little too big for the scanner, but she has about 170 cartoons done, and about 100 of them were done during the pandemic.

She’s always drawn cartoonish style things, and has always had a sense of humor. Her favorite cartoonist does “The Far Side,” Gary Larson. When she figured out that she could draw like him, her confidence grew. Her father passed away before he could see any of her cartoons, but he also loved Gary and she draws thinking about her father and how much she knows he would love her cartoons.

Mostly her validation came from her mother, because she loved all of her work. She didn’t hold back if she felt that something didn’t really jive with her. She’d say she didn’t understand certain things, and Jennifer would rethink it. “If she didn’t get it, then nobody else is gonna get it.”

She makes moveable murals for people who aren’t allowed to paint on their walls. Her mother had just moved into a new apartment with a horrible tan panel she couldn’t get rid of. She asked Jennifer to paint a mural for her to cover it up with 5 different major New York City landmarks. This led into other murals, and eventually a 5’ x 6.5’ backdrop for a radio play at a radio station.

She loves painting for other people, and most of her work has been custom.

“I have this habit of somebody saying they want something, and I automatically say yes, not even thinking about it. And then they walk away and I’m like, oh my god, what did I just do? So when you’re working on that kind of thing, you kind of have a sense of panic that it’s just not gonna be right.”

She has a smaller studio, so she does everything on the floor! Even though she worries about things being perfect,

“I still love doing stuff for other people because it means something. It’s not just about me, it’s about them. I would much rather do stuff for people. I just want to make it about them.”

She can only hang up so many things in her house that she did just for her!

She painted her son’s bedrooms every few years when they wanted something new. She painted a huge, realistic-looking moon on a dark background with stars, etc.

Her cartoons make people think – she likes to get detailed and watch people react.

“It’s nice to see the light turn on over their head when they finally get it.”

With paintings of lighthouses and boats or whatever, those are more of her learning how to do that kind of painting. Most of her pandemic paintings were small squares, and they’re on gallery canvas so you don’t have to frame them. Painting realistic sky and water is really hard! People think skies are a certain blue and waves look white with blue in the background, etc. But that’s not really what it’s like at all. So a lot of those were just to see if she could do it the way she wanted.

Then she did a few paintings of photographs, and people are pretty generous about allowing her to paint them. She tried to make it look less whimsical and like something they’d want to hang on their wall.

She’s thrilled to paint things for people that show a memory they want to keep. That’s a really nice feeling to know somebody wants that.

For her mother’s 80th birthday, she made a 33-page cartoon book of her life and all the stories she told growing up.

“It’s a really nice feeling when somebody is thrilled to have it.”

I talk about making homemade cards for people, and how some people love and appreciate them and others don’t really care so much. Jennifer shares how she made a handful of original watercolor cards of the Menorah for Hanukkah one year, and only one family member even acknowledged that they received any kind of card at all.

Her husband bought her an embosser that says “Artwork by J.W. Love,” so she puts it on the backs of cards and envelopes, and that has come in handy sometimes.

She loves doing radio plays more than any other kind of performance art, because you don’t have memorize the script, just be familiar with it! That liberates you and lets you focus on your characterization, and not worrying about what you look like. It’s all about timing and reacting and sound effects. She’s done about 25 of them (by summer 2021).

The radio plays get aired in front of a live audience. It’s so much fun to do different characters, or to play multiple characters in the same radio play.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.”

She was in “Working,” which was originally a musical, but they played the music in the background and she and the other cast members read the script. She did “Rebecca,” and they needed somebody to scream during the show. She said yes without thinking about it, but almost made everyone fall off their chairs! She became known as the “scream” girl.

Doing these during the pandemic was challenging and not as much fun because of the social distancing and masks and less rehearsals.

She was in a play when her mother was dying, and lost all of her confidence in performing because she was having a hard time remembering her lines during that time. After that experience, she told the director in the next show that she just wanted to assistant direct and not act. The director asked her to do one tiny part, and that one paragraph turned into five different scenes with a lot of words, and she did okay. That’s why she likes the radio shows, because she doesn’t have that fear of letting other people down.

She’s very grateful to Eric Joseph for introducing her to radio plays. One person also decided to pursue voiceover acting because of it!

Now she has 33 paintings she’s trying to get on Etsy, but that woman’s voice who told her she wasn’t an artist has kind of paralyzed her and stopped her from getting it set up. But people have asked her about buying her work and she has sold a number of them. Before the pandemic she was scheduled for a few art shows. It’s hard when she gains momentum and then when everything got stopped in its tracks because of the pandemic, it was hard to get that momentum back. She’s hoping that when she has no more excuses, she wants to continue painting and selling on Etsy or somewhere similar.

“My whole world is one big creative thought. I’ve always striven to not make things like everybody else.”

“I think with things that I can make better by putting something more imaginative into it, it brings me more joy and takes away any kind of drudgery.”

Lately she’s been collecting seashells and crushed them up and made a walkway in her garden. It looks like a piece of the seashore.

“Any time you can do something that raises the bar for you a little bit and makes you want to see it or share it, that’s really key.”

She feels bad for people who don’t have any kind of artistic outlet. She wonders what she would do if she couldn’t do any of the creative things she loves.

She talks about a drawing class she taught at the Jacobs School in Hull where she just used basic shapes. She showed all the kids who said they couldn’t draw how to make things with basic shapes, and they were able to draw a lighthouse and other things with circles, triangles, squares, etc. One of the kids was really surprised and happy to know that he could draw, if he wanted to.

“People who think they can’t do anything, I believe that they probably could. They need to think about it a little bit more instead of saying, no, I can’t do that.”