Every painting is a poem
That I wish to send to you.
The words are on my lips
May I paint it for you too?

Jenny Schnabel – Before earning her BFA in Interior Design from Arizona State University, Harrah’s Tahoe hired Jenny as one of the many undergrads from all over the country for summer employment. After finishing college, she returned to Lake Tahoe to work for many years in art/design-related businesses and eventually moved to Carson City. She was encouraged to create her art again in a Carson City Senior Center watercolor class in 2014 when a teacher told her she was an artist and that she would attend Jenny’s first reception. Shortly after, Jenny joined NAA, where she continues learning from other artists in workshops, classes, and socializing and where she now organizes the NAA’s involvement in Carson City’s monthly Wine Walk.

Jenny Schnabel is a people person. In 2016, she originated a monthly poetry column, “Jenny’s Talk About Town”, introducing local businesspeople to the readers of the Nevada Appeal. She wrote over one hundred poems until COVID changed our world in 2020. During Covid, Jenny turned to the Milan Art Institute to further her art training, taking an intense yearlong online course taught by expert painters. The Institute required work in various media and techniques, with her regularly putting in weekly 5–6-hour workdays. Through this course, she found a direction for her whimsical, expressionistic artistic style, which had been influenced in her childhood.

Jenny grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, north of Chicago, on the border of Lake Michigan. Her grandmother was her early mentor, taking Jenny to every museum possible in Chicago. Their favorite was the Chicago Art Institute, which had “Mrs. Thorne’s Miniature Rooms.” Jenny refers to a Christmas tree felt skirt her grandmother made in the 50’s which illustrated in miniature playful images the story of “The Night Before Christmas”. Jenny puts this skirt around her Christmas tree every year to this day. The simplicity of joy and happiness in this skirt now reveals itself through many of Jenny’s paintings. She authored poems for every painting she did for a while and still links her visual work to familiar verbal expressions or lore or her own poetic creations.