"I paint the skies with peace and passion, because that's the way they paint me." Jeni creates realistic, impressionistic and abstract skyscapes in oil, acrylic and mixed media.
Her biggest inspiration are the open skies of the California low desert where she lives. There are few cloudy days there so they are always a special treat. Her signature refractured watercolor medium starts as transparent watercolor on watercolor paper. She paints each sky many times, depending on the size she is working to. Each variant is in slightly different colors and because it is wet in wet. Then she cuts them and collages them back together. She likes to juxtapose pieces that have a partially matched edge which gives an interesting mix of flow and clash. Finally, she may add foreground – often the hills and reflections in the initial inspiration – dawn off the back porch looking across the Salton Sea, sometimes random horizons, sometime no land, just trees, sometimes words are incorporated.

She stole the term 'refracturing' from quilters who saw her work, and had the term recognized by the international collage magazine 'Kolaj' in 2016.

She also describes the creation of the refractured watercolors thus: Starting with an abstract subject – the sky, painting it realistically (though loosely), then cutting it up and rearranging it to give a level of impressionism.

Her move to including words is one of the ways she have found of combining that other half of her creativity – poetry. She will create a painting, write a poem about it and paint it into the painting. Another step in the journey to depict skies is to not fill the entire panel with refractured watercolor, but finish the un-collaged area in acrylic. The latter step into increasingly mixed media is also a step towards – or back to - abstraction. The other way of combining the two sides of her creativity is in poetry and painting books.