Jan Norsetter has been painting and drawing since childhood. She studied art in college and graduated with a B.S in art education, and an M.A. and M.F.A, from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She focused on printmaking during and immediately after college. For more than 15 years she has been painting: landscape, still life and rosemaling.
Her favorite medium is oil painting en plein air. Most of her plein air paintings are from locations within 50 miles of her Verona, Wisconsin home. Local, rural scenes including the Sugar River and its surrounds are favorite painting venues. She has also painted en plein air in the rest of Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Italy and Ireland. Plein air is all about capturing the mood of a day or a specific scene--showing the extraordinary beauty of the ordinary world around us.
Over the years Ms. Norsetter has studied oil painting with Scott Christensen, Diane Rath, Marc Hanson and Jonathan Wilde. She admires the landscapes of Theodore Robinson, Richard Schmid, Clyde Aspevig, Scott Christensen, Edgar Payne and Percy Grey to name a few. She has also studied the Norwegian folk art of rosemaling (Norwegian for flower painting) with Norwegian painters: Unni Lien, Sigmund Aarseth, Nils Ellingsgard, Turid Helle Fatland and American painters Pam Rucinski, Gayle Oram, Edrid Arntsen, Nancy Schmid, Joanne McVey, and Jean Giese.
In 2014 Ms. Norsetter was awarded a Wisconsin Arts Board Folk Art Grant to pursue studies with master rosemaler and Vesterheim Gold medalist, Pam Rucinski. The culmination of this apprenticeship was an exhibit at the Wisconsin State Rosemaling Exhibition, May, 2015. Her apprenticeship blog is at http://jansapprenticeship.blogspot.com
Ms. Norsetter is a full-time artist and lives in Verona, Wisconsin with her artist husband, Jon Sutcliffe. She has a dedicated studio in her home but considers much of the outdoors to be her studio, too.