I’m Jen Kerins
Step into my studio…
I'm a professional artist based in Basel, Switzerland, and I’m originally from Dublin, Ireland. Before settling here, I spent a lot of time travelling with my husband in a campervan, moving through the Irish landscapes that shaped much of my previous work. Now I’m on a different adventure, building a life in a new country, learning a new language, and starting again in unfamiliar territory.
I've been drawing and painting since I could first hold a crayon, and I'm so grateful to have grown up in a family that supported my creative pursuits from the start. While my path into becoming a full-time artist hasn’t been entirely linear, painting has always stayed present; adapting and evolving through every stage of my life.
At its core, my artwork explores what it feels like to be immersed in nature; from observed, real-world moments to more intuitive interpretations of memory, sensation, and atmosphere.
Some moments pull us completely out of ourselves and into the world around us
I’m drawn to experiences that make me feel fully immersed in the world around me; moments in nature that shift your perspective, heighten your senses, or just take you out of your everyday thoughts and routines.
Sometimes those moments are intense or unfamiliar, and sometimes they’re quiet. It could be being deep in the forest, swimming in open water, sitting around a fire, encountering wild animals, or simply noticing the scale, movement, and atmosphere of a place in a way that makes everything else fall away for a moment.
A lot of my work begins with those feelings and experiences, and the emotional impression they leave behind.
I’m interested in the connection between humans, animals, and the natural world, and in using both figurative and more abstract, atmospheric elements to explore emotion, instinct, freedom, power, and presence.
Painting with the land
The land has always been both muse and collaborator in my practice.
A lot of my work begins outside the studio, through time spent in nature, travelling, and simply observing places as I move through them. Earlier work was more closely tied to specific locations and reference material, often combining different images and moments into a single painting.
My current project is shaped by time spent travelling in Brazil, including experiences in and around the Amazon. While I’m still using observation and reference, my practice is slowly shifting away from working in a strictly literal way. I’m becoming more interested in how experience turns into atmosphere; how light, movement, and feeling can be carried through colour, structure, and composition, rather than described directly. Instead of building paintings only from reference, I’m exploring how to work from sensation, attention, and memory.
For me, painting is less about describing a place, and more about holding onto what it felt like to be there. I now started to work more with layered materials and mixed media to build up texture before painting in oils, allowing forms to emerge gradually rather than being fully planned from the start.
I’m currently in a period of exploration and transition as I begin developing my next collection.
Some of my earlier work is still available, and I continue to take on commissions while this new phase unfolds. I’ve also written my first blog post, about how I became a full-time artist, which you can read if you’d like to know more about that path.
“Most of my work doesn’t begin in the studio, but out in the world”
