LeRoy Jensen was born in Canada in 1927 and passed away on Salt Spring Island in 2005. He was raised in China and Japan, then studied painting at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and in Paris at the studio of the French cubist Andre L’Hote. He returned to Vancouver in 1954 to paint and also spent time in New York. On his return to B.C. he applied himself daily to his painting and also taught at the University of British Columbia and at the Banff School of Fine Arts. Jensen spent a lifetime communicating through the language of art with integrity and dedication to his work. He held solo shows and exhibited with the Limners in public and private galleries throughout Canada and the United States.
Whether working in oil, pastel, gouache or graphite, Jensen’s style can be characterized by an evocative line, by a loose, but charged stroke. His people and landscapes have a similar emotive energy. In later years Jensen focused on the female figure, sometimes nude, often large in rendering and unselfconscious. His palette is earthy and dark, yet Jensen’s bodies are luminous. Executed with the same spontaneity as the background, his figures both recede into and emerge from the shadows, lost in a moment of meditation or action. Jensen depicts not the anatomy of a particular body, but the dignity and beauty of the human spirit. This stellar body of work that is the legacy of the artist, LeRoy Jensen, allows us the rare opportunity to drink in the thoughtfulness, passion and energy that was the man.
“All that I have to say is in my work and it is grounded in my constant effort to find a suitable language for my expression. For me, painting is movement, luminosity and a discovery of the rhythm that underlies a subject. I must find the proper blend of these forces and set them free; then the reality appears by itself.” LeRoy Jensen