Jennifer Stenberg was born in Saskatchewan and educated in Manitoba. As the daughter of a civil engineer who worked for CN, she spent much of her early years on CN's Supercontinental. Jennifer made countless trips back and forth across Canada. At 18 she left Manitoba for Alberta, where she lived a dreamy nomadic life working in resorts and trekking across mountains and glaciers. From there she donned a backpack and widened her horizons to include more cross-Canada and international trips.

At 23 she landed in Edmonton where she began a career as a journalist at The Edmonton Sun It was there in 1980 that Jennifer first became a mother. She continued to work as a reporter and her later work as a fashion editor involved more travels across Canada, the U.S. and Asia.

In 1985 she left Edmonton and moved to Montreal where her second daughter was born in 1987. She wrote for the Gazette as well as other magazines. It was at the Gazette that she gravitated towards the graphic arts department finding work as an "old-fashioned" cut and paste layout artist. The next move was to Ontario — first Toronto for a few years and then to a country home in the rolling hills of Grey County. It wasn't until there, in her late 30s that she ventured beyond graphic design and picked up a paintbrush for the first time.

Jennifer credits her experiences — the joy of raising two delightful daughters and her surroundings both past and present as the most significant part of her artistic training. She paints what she knows. The subjects therefore range from urban scenes to country landscapes, from grand sweeping vistas to intimate domestic still lifes. The ingredients for the night's supper is a familiar theme. She paints with acrylic and prefers the smooth surface of birch plywood over canvas.

On the large scale, she has designed and painted stage scenery. Her private commissions include everything from the portrayal of heritage buildings to murals in children's bedrooms. She is still a prairie girl at heart and car trips home, (where most of her family lives) and to those wide open spaces are essential.

"The instant I see that prairie sky open up in front of me, I take a long, deep breath and revel in that uninterrupted splendor. The horizon line drops to my feet and I see and love that sky — big, beautiful, wide-open, glorious sky."

Jennifer moved to the artistic community of Flesherton, Ontario in 2000 where she joined forces with three other artists and opened the Heard House Gallery. A year later, with two more partners, she opened the larger Left Side Gallery. After three years and a great deal of learning, the gallery has changed hands and Jennifer has shifted gears. What she learned in five years of shows (which opened fresh at the start of each month), advertising, press releases, installing, lighting — and the mountains of paperwork — gave her the confidence and momentum to start promoting herself.

"The years of meeting other artists have been invaluable but the reason I got into the gallery in the first place was to have a place to show my paintings," she said. In January, 2008 it had become clear what she wanted to do.