About the Artist
Jenny Baham
Born in Taipei, Jenny spent the first half of her working life far from a canvas, climbing a technology career across Asia for companies like Apple, SAS and Gartner. It was a full, demanding life — and in 2005 it caught up with her. A health scare brought on by stress sent her to a doctor who told her, simply, to balance her life. She signed up for a beginner pencil sketching class expecting nothing more than a hobby. She found her calling instead. She still describes it as a gift from God. That gift became a discipline in 2008, when she began training under the internationally renowned Master Jiun Pan, refining the smooth line and accurate color that now define her oil paintings. She immigrated to the U.S. for good in 2013, and has called Las Vegas home ever since. Today Jenny is painting her way through America's National Parks, canvas by canvas, from Glacier and Yellowstone down through the Grand Canyon, carrying an enthusiasm for the American landscape that reads in every piece. Alongside the National Parks series she paints flamenco dancers, wildlife, portraits and the Las Vegas Strip itself, and since 2014 she has taught pencil sketching and oil painting at the College of Southern Nevada, mentoring students from five years old to seventy. She curated two major student exhibitions of her own making — Imagine in 2022 and Artistic Attack in 2024, the latter staged in the Chamber Gallery at Las Vegas City Hall — and continues to write a monthly column on painting and faith for the Las Vegas Chinese News Network. She lives in Las Vegas with her husband, Mel, whose portrait, My Husband, won her the International Peace Prize at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2024.
“Jenny Baham paints the American West the way she found her calling in it — one honest, luminous canvas at a time. A former Las Vegas tech executive turned oil painter, she has spent the last decade tracing the National Parks from Glacier to the Grand Canyon, and closer to home, the light on the Strip at night. Her work has been honored four years running at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art and now hangs in the City of Las Vegas's own public art collection.”
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
The Painting Process Jenny's process starts long before the brush touches canvas — usually on the road, sketchbook and camera in hand, standing in front of whatever National Park cliff face or wildlife scene stopped her cold. She works from those references back in her Las Vegas studio, laying in smooth, accurate line work first — a discipline she credits directly to her training under Master Jiun Pan — before building up the luminous color and light that has become her signature. She often describes the work as less a technical decision than staying out of the way of what she's been shown, treating each finished canvas closer to a gift received than a problem solved. The same unhurried, foundational approach carries into her teaching, where she walks College of Southern Nevada students through identical steps: sketch first, get the line honest, then let the color find its own light.
