2022 Featured Artist

Each year an artist is selected to prepare featured artwork that will represent the Brookside Art Annual. The 2022 features artist is returning artist Jennifer Cavan of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jennifer is a crowd favorite and was a 2021 Drawing & Pastel category award winner. Her oil pastels are bright, vibrant, and captivating. Although the 2022 artwork isn’t of a rural Missouri or Kansas skyline, the timeless night scene draws you into what many could easily envision as home.

“Relying on photographs, sketches, and memories of places I have found along the back roads of the American West, I use vibrant, saturated colors, bold compositions, and slightly altered perspectives to present, rather than represent, this special place. My “rose-colored glasses” interpret the scenes with heightened color. Mine is a contemporary depiction of an ageless place.”

After spending the early part of her adult life in the corporate world, Jennifer followed her love of art when New Mexico’s clarity of light, rich feeling of tradition, and strong sense of place pulled her “home.” She and her husband quit corporate jobs and moved to the mountains of northern New Mexico. “Shortly thereafter, I began working with oil pastels. Twenty years later, they are still my favorite medium. The buttery feel and the directness of applying the pigment without the go-between of a brush continue to fuel my love for these buttery crayon-like sticks.”

Visit Jennifer at Booth #52 near the intersection of 63rd Street and Brookside Boulevard to see her magnificent original works. Her work is also featured on the 2022 commemorative posters, shirts and cards which are available to purchase at the merchandise booth nearby, or at the information Booth at 63rd and Brookside Plaza.