WIDDERSHINS (right portion of Triptych) Painting

I WAS BORN IN MODESTO IN 1929 AS LAVIDA JUNE HUNT, AND I DREW AND PAINTED FROM THE TIME I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO HOLD A TOOL.
My mother remarried when I was five and we moved to Redding, California, where I attended school,and was fortunate in having gifted and dedicated teachers throughout my school years: they always gave extra in whatever field they taught, and I have never forgotten them.

My mother, a piano teacher, gave me music lessons and accompanied for a local dance teacher to pay for my classes with her. We performed often for clubs and schools.

I was a quiet child, loving to read and to be with my cats. The dance classes surely helped me to become more sociable, and later music lessons certainly gave me a "work habit" and a self-discipline that I feel has been essential in my art fields. Eventually even the simple ability to be alone for many hours at a time has served me well, especially my solitary day trips, from age 7 or 8, into the hills behind our house, carrying a lunch and often not returning till suppertime. Nature has always been important to me.

Gardening now helps give me the contact I need with the earth, now that camping is more difficult. One of my earliest memories is the wonder of digging up warm potato-bodies from my grandmother's garden during the Great Depression (1929=36).
ALL THESE THINGS BECAME THE BASIS FOR MY ART AND STILL APPEAR THERE. I do not paint "to express myself," but rather, to maintain contact with something far greater than myself. I follow a life thread, from work to work, and never know where it will lead me.

JENNY HUNTER GROAT has had formal training in Music, and full art lives in Modern Dance/Performance Arts,western Calligraphy, and now Painting, which she feels will be the major focus for the rest of her life. But she also makes Artist's Books, some collage, and, as she says, "I play with my friends online" in various Mail Art projects. Occasionally she writes the poetry or texts that she puts into her artwork.

She says, "It may be that I worked backwards, and should have been in the Painting world from the start, yet each of my art fields has contributed to what I do now. My paintings are a synthesis of what I've done in my first fields."

SHE FOUND HER INSPIRATIONS AT FIRST IN HER TEACHERS. She was inspired by her high school art teacher, Beatrice Kempf, who, in Groat's opinion, gave her students the equivalent of a first year art school education.