Jennifer Chase majored in Painting and Art Education from the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois in 1989. After college, she was an illustrator for a publishing company in Peoria. She moved to the Northside of Chicago in the late 1990s and found employment in graphic design and web development. It was there she met her husband. As a mother, she was a girl scout leader for 8 years and loved working with kids and making arts and crafts. Today she shares a 2-flat in Rogers Park with her teenage child, her husband and his parents.
She has painted all her life and participated in the annual Rogers Park “Artist of the Wall“ for the past 10 years. During the pandemic, she began painting the “polar bears”, something she had begun 20 years ago. Once she started painting in oils again, she decided she would need a studio and discovered the Greenleaf Arts Center in the Spring of 2021. This past Summer, she painted a 30 foot mural for Chicago Cirque Experience on Thorndale in Edgewater. Her paintings depict life studies of portraits, wildlife, and botanicals, and can tell a narrative or story. Bright, saturated paint colors create a fantasy style. Mediums include oils, acrylics, paper, canvas, wood, cement, brick and bark.
