Jen Olson is a self-taught figurative artist in Cromwell, Central Otago. She paints, draws, and uses mixed media to explore emotional landscapes through figures: people, animals, plants, flowers, and ordinary objects like chairs and spoons. Her practice centres on the expressive potential of a figure, and she looks for the extraordinary in everyday objects.
Working with acrylics, ink, markers, graphite, charcoal, and gold leaf, she paints portraits and metaphorical stories, often built from overlooked, everyday objects. An empty chair can hold presence and absence. A body can transform into a garden. A coffee cup becomes a vessel for longing. Bones and flowers speak to our histories and what lies beneath the surface.
She is drawn to tension: proportions slightly off-kilter, bright colours against ghostly forms, exaggerated features that reveal or conceal. Her work sits between the awkward, the sublime, and the uncomfortably familiar, aiming to capture the fragile moments that make us human.
Her influences include poets Ocean Vuong, Emily Dickinson, and Brian Turner, and visual artists Frida Kahlo, Mark Ryden, and Bill Hammond. Themes of connection and fate run through her work, raising questions of agency: inviting viewers to consider who is really writing the story, and whether we are authors of our own lives or simply figures in someone else's narrative.
The imperfect lines that draw us may be more powerful than fate.