About Jennifer
Jennifer Jarvis
Living her purpose and passion through painting.
Creating art has been an essential part of Jennifer’s life since childhood. She created Paint Your Peace to share what she’s learned and experienced about painting as a form of inner exploration and expression.
Jennifer works virtually with clients around the world to help them find peace through the process of painting. Jennifer attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and later earned a bachelor of science degree in Family Studies from the University of New Hampshire. As an early childhood educator and researcher at the University of New Hampshire’s Child Study and Development Center, Jennifer began meshing her interests in art and its use in brain development and education. One of her professional objectives was to research, facilitate and document children’s abilities to use art as a tool for their cognitive and emotional development work that proved invaluable for the children, and that laid the foundation for Jennifer’s journey toward developing a therapeutic painting practice.
She loved working with children, families and educators, and for several years continued her research on using art as a tool for exploration and expression. During this time, she also deepened her personal practice of finding peace through painting. This practice also would anchor Jennifer through the two decades she spent as the owner and manager of a successful restaurant in New Hampshire while raising her family.
After seeing her adult children launch their own lives and later selling the restaurant, she moved to the island of St. Lucia. It was there, with a newfound freedom to fuel her passion for painting, that serendipity struck. At a community street party, Jennifer found her way back to teaching through painting. Soon after, Paint Your Peace was born.
Jennifer believes creative, artistic expression resides within every person, just waiting to be discovered. And she believes everyone can find it — if they try, or if they’re guided to it. Jennifer serves as just such a guide.
“I’m helping people find and connect to a creative resource that is inside themselves,
giving them an opportunity to access a sense of peace they didn’t know was accessible to them, and now it is.”
The Therapeutic Side of Painting
In high school, Jennifer was “always in the art room,” she says, so it was a natural progression to pursue art in college. In Boston, she attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, where she explored all mediums — from drawing to painting with oils, acrylics and watercolors to wood carving, jewelry making, ceramics, glass sculpting and African resist dying.
As much as she enjoyed this range of creative possibilities, acrylic painting emerged as her preferred medium. And although her finished pieces received consistent praise, she began to realize that it was not the paintings she produced but the very process of painting she found most rewarding. It was at this time Jennifer found a new appreciation for the therapeutic benefits of painting.
“I wanted to paint for the feeling of peace I felt while painting,” she says. Understanding this, she decided to leave art school, shift her professional pursuits to family studies and education, and continue to paint for herself.
Education + Art
Jennifer earned a bachelor of science degree in Family Studies at the University of New Hampshire, and went on to become a certified early childhood educator. She began teaching and conducting research at the UNH Child Study and Development Center, where she also began meshing her knowledge of art with her training in education, psychology, brain development and family dynamics.
She used various art mediums as tools to engage and inspire children, to interest them in the wonder of creating, and to encourage them toward problem solving, curiosity and higher-order thinking. Success in this approach soon led her to support other teachers in integrating art into all aspects of their curricula. The Child Study & Development Center is also where Jennifer’s interest in community art was born. She initiated and facilitated a center-wide community wire sculpture project, as well as several community murals, all of which added to her body of research.
This work culminated in co-authoring an article on how using art as a tool for both creation and reflection can promote higher order thinking. This was published in the journal Young Children, and Jennifer also presented the findings at an education conference at Tufts University.
Entrepreneurship and Community Leadership
As much as Jennifer loved this work and research, she left the University of New Hampshire to raise her own family. She kept her part-time job at a nearby restaurant where she’d put herself through school, and eventually had the opportunity to purchase the business. Managing employees and patrons became a whole new way to apply her training in psychology, and maintaining the inventory while striking the right profit margins was a whole new realm of higher order thinking.
She excelled at it, and her presence in the community deepened into leadership roles – including as an elected member of the town council for three consecutive terms, one of which she served as the appointed chair. Although her family, the restaurant and several community involvements kept Jennifer busy, she continued to paint to recharge herself. Painting remained a priceless source of peace as she juggled new responsibilities and confronted new challenges.
Return To Painting
After 20 years as a restaurateur, Jennifer opened herself to creating a new phase of her life. She had fallen in love with the country of St. Lucia in the course of several trips to the island, and in 2022 felt drawn to return for an extended period of time. The sea, the mountains and the vibrant culture there inspired her to paint even more, and she eventually set up her easel at a weekly street party in the community of Gros Islet, with the intention of selling her work. This unfolded as planned, but an unexpected magic also began to spark.
Watching Jennifer paint ignited the curiosity of children and adults, alike. Rather than simply answering their questions about her technique, Jennifer would hand them her brush and guide them to experience painting themselves. More passersby would see this happening and get curious about whether they could try painting, too. Week after week this occurred, and Jennifer followed the energy.
Her set-up at the local street party grew from one easel to many, and eventually several tables where a dozen or more people of all ages would crowd around to paint together. It was spontaneous and joyous for all, and transformative for Jennifer. Watching people’s faces light up as she taught them to paint, she realized, was worth far more than selling her own work — just as the process of painting had felt so much more rewarding than her professors’ praise in art school.
“I was inspiring people to paint, and I was being inspired by people’s responses,” she says.
“Everything started to connect.”
Pulling from her own experiences, training and education in art, psychology, art therapy and human development, Jennifer began teaching people how to paint for the purpose of painting by focusing on the process: touching brush to paper, creating and blending colors, discovering shapes, and generating a feeling of peace by freeing yourself to connect with and express your inner landscape.
As Paint Your Peace emerged, she continued her community art outreach in St. Lucia and beyond. Jennifer finds inspiration in traveling and connecting with local culture, people and art. She currently splits her time between Colorado and New Hampshire, and travels every chance she gets. Jennifer now offers a multitude of ways for people to find peace through painting, including group wellness workshops, community painting “pop up” studios and virtual sessions with individual clients around the world.
