36” x 36” Mixed Media 2024

Jean is the author of “Expressive Portraits: Creative Methods for Painting People”. She has been painting for over twenty years, balancing her strong teaching abilities, and writing with her continuing aspiration to convey her ideas in visual form.

Jean’s traditional practice includes referential imagery of people, still life, landscape and abstraction. The layering of a variety of media offers Jean an assortment of possibilities within her work; quality of edge, line and texture all play a role within her imagery. Although Pederson is well known for her mastery of watercolours, mixed media has become an important venue for her creative expression. The portraits in her paintings are based on people who she has met or impacted her. These subjects in her paintings often reflect different walks of life as well as diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. We are hard pressed to find a period in time when the human figure wasn’t represented. Finding a way to express the human figure in a language that reflects the twenty-first century is perhaps the greatest challenge in figurative work today.

Jean has work placed in the Royal Collection in Winsor England, and has been honored with numerous National and International awards over the years. In 2005 Jean was the first recipient of the Federation of Canadian Artists Early Achievement Award, granted for her many honors, awards, international writing to promote art education, and consistent, exceptional painting.

Jean Pederson has exhibited her work Internationally in China, London England, Stockholm Sweden, New York -United Nations, San Francisco, Mexico and across Canada.

“It is my desire to employ different materials, scale and processes in my work and are the evidence of an artist always taking risks  searching for that connection , that one "true" moment between myself ,  subject and you the viewer.  The openness , immediacy and sensitivity of my hand while simultaneously rendering a likeness creates complex fluid personages that reflect the emotional and psychological complexity common to each of us, flawed, compassionate, vulnerable and that which makes us most human.”  -jean pederson-