Jake Gaedtke – 2020 Brinton 101

Like most landscape painters, Jake loved the outdoors and he grew up spending a great deal of time camping, fishing, hiking, and exploring. As a teenager of sixteen Jake’s parents allowed him to take the two-year Famous Artist Course for Young People. A correspondence art course that started him on a path of learning and discovery of the art world. A high school art teacher fresh out of college bellowed the fire inside of Jake through his passion, enthusiasm, and love for drawing, painting, and art history. His personal interest in learning and growing as an artist is something that has never left him. Having spent years on other career paths, he always struggled with his desire to paint full time.
After spending a few years doing graphic design and illustration, Jake decided to take a plein air workshop with the landscape painter Jay Moore. His experience in that workshop finally convinced him that this is what he wanted to do. Jake took two more workshops with Jay when he invited Jake to take his newly formed one-on-one Mentorship program. After five grueling months of extremely hard work and study, Jake’s growth as an artist took a professional turn and he hasn’t looked back since.

“Painting from life challenges me as an artist to concentrate every sensory nerve of the information in front of me. I absorb it all, from sight to sound to scent, from temperature to atmosphere – I recreate my experience by channeling those feelings from head and heart to hand, through paint, onto canvas.

My journey as an artist is to share my vision and experience of the natural world and its many marvels. My goal is to couple my knowledge of art history and the learned disciplines of skilled technique with all the emotion I feel “in the moment” when I am painting – to capture that moment of intense awareness for the viewer to experience and enjoy as I did.

In both my field studies and my studio paintings, I invite the observer to journey with me into a world of total sensory awareness of the countless wonders and manifold expressions of nature.” Jake Gaedtke