Jennifer Marshall

Born Jennifer Jowett, in Murwillumbah, NSW in 1955, Jennifer grew up in the country where she developed a deep love and appreciation for the Australian bush. However her first love was horses, and this drove her to draw and study them from a very early age. Her love of horses and the Australian landscape are combined in her paintings of working horses and Australian history. Jennifer has also painted numerous portraits and flower studies.

Jennifer’s formal education began in a little 1-2-teacher school at Upper Burringbar in NSW . It was here she sold her first drawings and watercolours. She excelled in Art at Murwillumbah High School and was among the top ten Art students in the 1973 NSW Higher School Certificate. She completed her Dip. Ed. in General Primary Teaching at Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education in 1976, having done Art as Main Study, and began exhibiting and selling her acrylic paintings locally. This she continued to do in country regions of Central NSW until 1987 when she moved to the Mackay region and exhibited there until moving to Warwick in 2006.

Jennifer painted in acrylics until she discovered pastels in 1985, and watercolours in 1994 and recently has used alkyds and oils with her acrylics.

In 1993 she was accepted as a Master Pastellist with the Pastel Society of Australia and as tutor of Pastel classes for the Mackay Campus of James Cook University in 1994 and 1995.
Jennifer met Ron Marshall in December 1995 in a gallery in Mackay, Queensland. Working in partnership they won the 1996 Mackay Airport mural competition. These Murals now hang at the Mackay Tourist Information Centre (see at right). They married in December 2000, and lived in Slade Point, Mackay until they moved to Warwick in southern Queensland in early 2006. Since her marriage to Ron, Jennifer has chosen to paint under her married name Marshall, rather than her maiden name of Jowett.

In 2001 Ron and Jennifer together painted for the Nebo Shire Council a large painting which depicts the diversity to be found in the Nebo Shire, and which features in the Historic Nebo Monument seen as you enter Nebo. They were then commissioned by Nebo Shire to do a painting the same size as the first, depicting the historic gold mining town of Mount Britton (see at left). This has also been used for signage on the way to the old town site. Fascinated by the history and the landscape surrounding this old gold-mining town they then embarked on “The Mount Britton Collection”, a series of paintings depicting the real-life characters and events that took place in and associated with this place.

More recently they have embarked on another historical series … the “Australian Light Horse” ... something Ron had wanted to do for some time. “Hoofbeats, History, Waves and Wilderness”, an exhibition held at the Warwick Art Gallery in April-May 2007, featured both series of paintings, and received a very positive response from the public, many of them going back to view the paintings 3 and 4 times.