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n article in the Dining section of the New York Times a few days ago featured a red-wine toned illustration of Alicia Florrick and Olivia Pope, with large glasses of red wine. That was the focus of an article – red wine being the favored drink of powerful women on some TV shows.

Jenny Kruger’s illustration of actresses Kerry Washington and Juliana Magulies accompanied a recent New York Times article about their characters (in TV dramas Scandal and The Good Wife) who wrap up their days with large glasses of red wine. It was the former Oriental resident’s first illustration for the Times.

For those viewing it in Oriental, the illustration may have struck a familiar chord. It was the work of one-time Oriental resident, Jenny Kruger, whose parents Ana-Maria and Bob Kruger, owner of the R&D company OptoSonics, still live near Oriental.

Jenny was starting out in a career as an artist when she moved to Oriental in the middle of the last decade. She had several exhibitions over the years here. In one series of area landscapes she highlighted buildings on the verge of oblivion. The titles for all were the lat/long GPS coordinates — a help perhaps for future archaelogists.

A building on Kershaw Road, circa 2007, in a painting by Jenny Kruger. This was one of a series of paintings on wood, where parts of the woodgrain remained exposed. Here it helped depict what the shacks own unpainted sides looked like.. It is titled 35.18.71N, 76.51.7 W – GPS coordinates for the structure – and can be seen at Dr. Elizabeth Cordes office at Oriental Dental.

Another series showed hands, people sleeping or landscapes seemingly between layers of floral wallpaper.

Jenny’s path from Oriental to the illustration in the Times comes by way of the Great Plains. She and her two young sons now live in Columbus, Nebraska where she is a full time art professor at Central Community College.

She says she’s also painting “quite a bit. I paint mainly landscapes these days being out here in the prairie. Over the summer The Kansas City Chiefs bought one of my new pieces for Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, KS, and it is now in their permanent collection in their newly renovated Club.”

A 2006 portrait of a local restaurant employee, titled Beverly.

In Oriental, some of her earliest works were large portraits of local residents. Her current website shows illustrations of faces more widely known – world leaders and politicians. And as was the case last week, TV characters.

The illustration that appeared in the Times on October 29th hadn’t even been a splash of ink on paper 5 days earlier. Jenny says an art director at the NYT first got in touch with her on Friday the 24th.

“He gave me very specific direction of what he wanted from what characters would be featured to what should be in the background. He wanted me to emphasize the red wine aspect more than the figures, so I painted it in India ink to look like different shades and types of red wine. He needed sketches by the end of that same day.”

“New York is an hour ahead, so I had until 4p CST to get him a sketch to show his editors. That day I had to teach classes and pick up my kids from school, but I did those two things and got him the sketch in on time.”

If the illustration gave the impression of various shades of merlot, pinot noir and malbec, that was intentional.

“We did go through 8 rounds of sketch revisions to arrive at a final sketch, him directing me by email and over the phone. I started the final in ink on Saturday, and he needed it by Monday morning. I got it done Sunday, scanned it and emailed it to him, and still had time to carve pumpkins with my boys.”

Wallflower #5 by Jenny Kruger.

Getting her first work in to the NYT is a story of laying some groundwork and then waiting.

“I had mailed promotional postcards of my work once a week for 6 months to this particular art director at the NY Times.” Response was not immediate as Jenny made clear in a recent email.

“I did that mailing SIX YEARS AGO,” a span of time in which Jenny had called Brooklyn, Oriental and now Nebraska, home. “One postcard had been sitting on his desk for 6 years until he finally had a way to use me. My contact information and name had changed, but he was able to find my new website.”

And from there the illustration came about in a whirlwind weekend.
“I was exhausted,” Jenny Kruger says, but “hoping this leads to more calls.”

Posted Sunday November 2, 2014 by Melinda Penkava