Jennifer Hunter is a nationally recognized award winning artist known for her sensitive storytelling with the use of her paintbrush. Her artwork comes to life telling a story the viewer finds interesting but also realistic. Recently she found herself facing one of her greatest fears. Surgery. She might never paint again due to a spinal cord injury. 

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Now listen to this episode, featuring me.

Jennifer Hunter and my recovering and healing using a paint brush

Jennifer Hunter is a nationally recognized award winning artist.

She's known for her sensitive storytelling of American history with the use of her paint brush.

Many of her stories are of the American west.

Her animal paintings are exceptional.

And I find it interesting that she took anatomy classes to help her understand the movement of

not just people, but the animals that she paints.

They do come to life.

And that is her goal.

To tell a story with figures that the viewer finds interesting, but also realistic.

In fact, her paintings have been in multiple shows and exhibitions, including the visitor

center at the grand canyon, the museum of Western art in Texas, and a permanent collection

at Rocky mountain national park in Colorado.

Jennifer always felt courageous to share her stories through her art.

She put herself out there for the world to see, and she felt no fear, but one day she found herself

facing a different kind of threat and a different set of positive imprints that she would be making.

Jennifer Hunter

I am so pleased that we were able to finally connect, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you, Catherine.

It's really nice to be here.

It's great.

I'm looking at this beautiful you and this beautiful background.

I know you paint horses and I see horses back there behind you.

What part of the United States are you in?

I'm in Illinois,

Northern Illinois in the suburbs of Chicago, actually.

I began in Indiana.

My folks moved to Illinois when I was about nine.

And I've kind of been around here ever since.

Where I live right now I have the Fox river right outside there.

So we have wetlands behind the house and we've got Sandhill cranes and there's

actually an Eagle nest on the Fox river.

So I do see Eagles fly over the house.

Uh, we go kayaking.

It's kind of a neat place to live.

Oh, absolutely.

And some of those Sandhill cranes just might be some of ours from New Mexico when they migrate.

I love the Sandhill cranes and the sounds.

They make the calls.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When you're walking around out there and you come face to face with what they're about four feet tall,

have you ever painted

one?

I have, yeah, there's a painting actually, upstairs of Sandhill cranes dancing.

And they do that.

They do a beautiful life is grand, and I know we're still in the COVID, but you're finding

time away from all of this with your painting.

And I want to talk about why you chose the American history and Western art.

It's really about storytelling and exploring.

If you think about when you're a kid and all the things you would do to

explore and imagine you're someplace else

and if you start imagining you're someplace else in a different place in time, you can go there.

And I absolutely loved horses.

When I was a kid and when, where I grew up, there was a farm next door as the suburbs were being built.

So of course you always made friends with the kid that had the ponies and we rode all over the neighborhoods.

And historical imagery is a really good way to put a horse in a paintings

if you love painting horses there's all kinds of ways to do that.

So when you're talking about different ways of doing that, you're

talking about them with a different motion.

So what can you, well, not

motion, but telling stories.

If we think about our American history, there's a hoof printed next to every footprint.

Oh my gosh.

That's how this country was established.

Yes.

Go way back there weren't trains.

it took quite a while.

And then there were stage coaches, but there's horses.

There were covered wagons.

A lot of times those were pulled by oxen cause the horses were not strong enough for that.

So there's just, I mean, we would not be where we are now.

If there had not been horses,

you tell these stories with such sensitivity and that's something that people do say about you

is that you're sensitive with your storytelling.

Is it because of the title that you choose or is it the colors of the painting that you've chosen?

Why do you think people say that about you?

I become a voice for a lot of people who are long gone and it's a connection because

we, as Americans have this history and then our country was shaped by the people who came before us.

And in a way we do owe them a lot of gratitude for that, because everything we have was

built upon the foundation that they created.

And I pretty much do relate to the people I meet.

I have native American friends and they tell me their stories and they tell me their history.

And I really try to be honest to relay that in a way that they would appreciate.

That defines you truly.

So with what you just said, I would love for you to talk about two of your

paintings, which have such a profound title.

And this is a podcast so you will need to describe it for the listeners.

So the first one is a century of wisdom in his eyes.

That is a portrait of chief David Bald Eagle.

And I feel very honored and privileged that he sat down with me like you're doing now.

And we recorded a conversation and that was a few years ago.

And he, since he has since passed away, but his story as an individual is actually pretty incredible because

he was born in a teepee and they went on Buffalo hunts.

He didn't speak English.

When he was a child, he spoke Lakota and he was raised by his grandmother.

He was related to, uh, and I'm losing the name now.

It's, it's an Indian chief who was in the battle of little big horn, but his life was incredible

because he had his native American background, but he was also a world war II veteran.

He was a paratrooper who landed at Normandy and he was actually left for dead.

And he was rescued by soldiers, British soldiers who realized he was alive and took

him to the hospital and he actually recovered.

So that alone is pretty amazing.

He's been a rodeo rider.

A race car driver.

And he did a lot of old Western movies like that they were doing in Hollywood back then.

And he was even in some movies with Marilyn Monroe.

That's so interesting.

And so you were able to tell his story in the title.

How did you come up with that?

Because.

Over your lifetime and through all the experiences that you have, you learn a heck of a lot and

you can pass that onto the younger generations.

Hopefully people will listen to things like that, but to talk to him was just incredible.

We had such a connection and he was very close to 100.

He didn't quite make it to a hundred before he passed, but he was very close.

His eyes actually do tell a story.

I mean, you're speaking to him, but you feel a depth.

And the connection.

And after I sat down and we had that conversation, that long conversation, the next time I saw

him, he was driving in with this car two-ten and waving, wanted me to see him arriving.

And it was just funny.

Later his people would choose him to be their chief, not just of his tribe, but the leader

of all the indigenous tribes of the world.

That is such a wonderful story.

And you did take time to really reflect on what you wanted to call the painting.

I'm going to kind of go off of what you just said about this gentlemen, you said that

as we get older, we have wisdom to share.

Now I'm paraphrasing what you said, and we go through experiences.

We go through life.

And so that brings me, before we get to that, painting that second painting.to your life.

Because as a painter, you are obviously showing and sharing and inspiring others with these amazing

positive imprints, through that sensitivity of storytelling of historical events or just the past,

they don't have to be actual events, but of our past.

And that's where your positive imprints are, but something happened to you

that is so profound that changed you.

This second painting called, lost and found is almost about you in

a sense.

Yeah, I was losing something very dear to me, and that was my gift and my

physical ability to create paintings.

And that happened because of an old traffic accident, I'd had a whiplash and it was 20 years earlier.

And I had told myself I was fine.

Right.

As we do.

Yes, yes.

Right.

You just kind of go along and you're doing your best you can.

But that came back to haunt me because what actually happened is is over time as you age, you can have

cracks open up in the discs within your spine and they start to herniate and rupture, and then they

start to collapse and your body tries to stabilize it.

So you start to grow bone spurs there, and all of that can go into your spinal cord

if it's within the central spinal canal.

And that's what happened to me.

So I was actually losing the ability to hold my arms up.

I mean my hand work so I could move my hands, but holding my arm up and

directing that's when I was losing.

So it meant things like driving a car, pushing a shopping cart were incredibly difficult.

I was having pain all over my body.

It was affecting my ability to walk because if you compress your spinal cord in your

neck, every signal that goes to the rest of your body goes through your neck.

And just depending on where it gets compressed.

And when you turn your head and the spinal cord is floating in there and fluid, and it just turns

and lands or whatever in a certain way, if that canal narrows, and you've got something grip in

your spinal cord, it's going to cause a problem.

And when this first started, the first set symptom I actually had was I had a pain in my ankle.

I turned my head.

I felt like a dog was biting my ankles.

Oh my goodness.

I turned my head back forward.

And it went away.

So I could turn it on and off.

I'm not, but as, as time progressed, things got worse.

I got more and more pains all over my body.

I'd have muscles jumping and doing different things like spasms.

Uh, I'd get bad headaches.

You get spasms in your neck and it's pulling on your, your spine and all, all those

muscles go up on the back of your head.

So you get horrible headaches, uh, even dizziness from that kind of stuff.

So I did see some spine surgeons and.

I saw locally, actually five different spine surgeons and none of them would help.

Wait,

why was that?

Wow.

Well, according to what I have figured out is my presentation of symptoms was a little bit unusual

because when you've got pain all over your body, like in your feet, your arms, your legs, top of your

head, your back everywhere, it confuses the doctors.

Because they're looking at where the nerves come out of the spine, and those are all definitely mapped.

And there's something called a dermatome map, which shows that the problem I had was that whole big bundle.

That was the axons going down, that we're going to send signals out to all the nerves go up and down.

Your spine was getting squished..

And it's just depending on how it gets pushed or how it gets turned is what it's going to affect.

So I probably scared doctors out of helping me because those symptoms could

be, MS could be an inflammatory disease.

They always look for things like ALS those kinds of problems.

And I mean, let's face it.

Surgeons want to see a case that they can fix and have success.

They don't really want to take cases that might not have a good outcome.

So if they're unsure, they're more likely to pass.

It's not such a good thing for patients because patients get left behind and many of them don't know

why and don't know how to advocate for themselves.

So these are all things I had to learn how to do, even though I was scared to death.

When a doctor, a surgeon tells you, well, yes, you've got significant spinal cord compression

you need surgery, it gets your attention.

And then at that time I was also having dizziness and I actually had fallen over.

I had some vertigo and that's another thing that could be, it could be a spine problem, like aI had.

It could be so many other things that muddy the waters.

I would always kind of be looking for the next surgeon in case I got refused

because it was becoming a pattern.

And I decided I'd look at Mayo Clinic and I was looking at a surgeon, they're trying to match them

up to what I needed and what his interests were.

And I read their published papers of this particular surgeon, and he talks about leg pain.

He was a coauthor on a paper and talked about something called funicular pain.

I didn't know what that meant.

So I looked that up and funicular pain is a referred pain, which was exactly what I was having, where

there's compression of the spinal cord and it's causing the pain somewhere else in your body.

And they can't exactly trace it to where it is.

And I found because of that terminology, I found medical cases like mine that were written up in

literature, and I could understand what I was reading because I do also have a biology degree.

I did work in research at the university of Chicago for awhile, actually for a neuro anatomist.

That's interesting.

It is interesting.

And so I have some published work.

His name is on it, but I was his lab assistant.

So I did preparations of the slides for the microscope and did some darkroom work.

And I actually did do some drawings.

So my first published artwork actually is a science drawing.

So

telling a story there,

but anyway, so I found this literature with this doctor's name on it.

So I wrote him a letter and I explained that I'd been turned down five times and a month later,

Mayo called and offered me an appointment.

The first day they were doing the testing.

And then you would meet the neurosurgeon on day number two.

So one of the things I did to cope, it's kind of hard to be a patient and go through the most painful

tasks, what those neurologists are going to do and I had started using my own artwork and music as coping

mechanisms, I thought I could be turned away again and I needed the doctor to understand what I needed to do.

So I took a real painting with me to Mayo, uh, which was the one called fresh horses.

So I, when I was going through the testing, I took what was hanging on the wall at Mayo in that

lab off the wall and I hung my painting there.

I could look at it and I could take myself there I had painted the painting.

I was really familiar with it.

I could take myself to another place in time, instead of thinking about what they were doing and it works.

Anybody can use visual image imagery.

You don't have to be an artist, so you can have a favorite place, a photograph.

You could remember a hike, anything.

You can think about a pet, you can take pictures with you.

All those strategies really work.

So I had done that and then I went to meet the surgeon on the next day.

Took the painting into the, to the appointment.

So it was up on the chair and he came down and looks at it.

Oh, what's that?

You know?

And so I, I told him, I said, well, that was my painting.

I said, this is what I need to be able to do.

I really liked that.

I wouldn't mind having something like that hanging in my house.

And I said, well, you know, You know, I said that could be arranged and everybody laughed, which is great.

That was a wonderful beginning when you meet a surgeon, because when you're a patient sitting there

and you need surgery and you're waiting for the surgeon to walk into the room,whom you have not met,

that's kind of anxiety producing.

Oh,

absolutely.

My gosh.

Absolutely.

And just getting to the doctor is anxiety.

Right?

All those five surgeons that were refusing to help me were helping me train myself in how to cope

with dealing with the fact that I needed surgery.

And one of the things I had done with for surgeon, number five, who he eventually, you

know, declined surgery, but I drew his picture

from what was on the internet about his profile.

So art

therapy, exactly that's definitely art therapy.

Right?

So with that in mind, I had to go see surgeon number six.

It, wow.

So I had a strategy, I took my camera and I asked him if I could take his picture.

And I told him why.

I said, I need to be comfortable with you and I need to, like you.

And I like the things that I paint and draw, so that's going to help me like you.

So he said, sure, take a picture.

So I took a few and I was drawing them when I eventually did have surgery.

So does he eventually do the surgery?

Oh yes, he did.

He did.

I ended up waiting, I think about five weeks before he can take me.

And you know, it was a relief that okay.

I've been validated.

I've now got a chance to save my palette and oh my God, I'm still going to have surgery.

Yeah.

Right.

And that's scary because anything can happen during surgery.

Right.

And when it's your spinal cord and you're facing that you could be paralyzed.

And the thing is, it's a real hard choice to make, but I decided that I was not

going to allow fear to choose for me.

I mean, there are patients out there who are so afraid of going through spine surgery, that they

allow their spine injuries to progress and the problems that they have, and they become disabled.

I took care of my parents in wheelchairs who were disabled and I thought, wow, I have a chance.

How many people get to choose whether they're going to be disabled or not?

Sometimes you don't,

you're bringing up some things that are very thought provoking.

Right.

And just hearing you say some of these things and the fact that you can tell your story

with those positive imprints in mind will inspire others to help them make decisions.

We only have one chance in life, you know, we're only on one, one journey, that's it!

And so those decisions are very difficult.

And I know you used art therapy, but you also mentioned you used music.

And so what kind of music therapy did you use?

Well, I did, that was back at the beginning of all of this.

And fear

had to have been pretty high at that point.

Yes.

I would wake up in the morning, remember, oh, I need spine surgery.

My blood pressure would shoot way up.

Well, I started taking my blood pressure to get the number.

I started listening to music.

And doing deep, relaxed breathing.

And I have a good friend who you've interviewed before his name's Mack Bailey.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

He is a music therapist..

Yes, he is a very good one too.

So you turn to him for some

therapy.

I turned to him for a little bit of advice.

I said, well, this is what I'm doing.

You know, what else can I do?

And he said, you're on the right track.

But the tip he gave me was to time my breathing to the music that I was listening to.

If you're tapping your foot, it's got a natural kind of rhythm and it kinda just works out.

Or if you're singing in a choir, there's a natural place when you have to take a breath

before you continue to sing, those are all things that are deep breathing set to music that

helps you relax and lowers your blood pressure.

So I did that daily and it was working and I was still asking myself hard questions as to why

I have the fears and what was provoking those from way back in my past from when I was a kid.

And for everybody, that's going to be a different answer, right.

Because we have different reasons why we're afraid of things, but I started building on it that way.

So I was doing this deep breathing, the music, and then I thought, okay, I

can associate an image with that music.

That's

very good

therapy.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Wow.

Things anybody can do.

They are.

And, uh, yeah, anybody can, and it's, what's hard I think Jennifer for people is to get

that frame of mind in place to do those things, because fear, you said that you're not going

to let fear overtake you or control you.

And oftentimes that's how we live.

We live because fear moves us to do something that we don't want to do, but it also...

fear puts a stopper on that frame of mind.

And so how do you get into the frame of mind?

How could you put yourself in that frame of mind by pushing that fear aside?

Well, my choice was faced with fear and have the surgery, or

don't face it and become disabled and lose

the ability to artwork

So it was putting the two in perspective,

right.

And my artwork.

The, the ability to do that is who I am.

And I love that, the most, about my life.

So I still would be an okay person if I lost that.

Yeah, that would be a disability to me.

And I would have been more disabled than just losing the coordination of my arms.

So there would have been problems walking.

There would have been a wheelchair in my future.

I would have lived in constant pain, constant headaches, dizziness at risk for falls, at risk for

paralysis, particularly if you were in a car and there was another car accident and you've already have a

spine where everything is compressed on it, you jar that or move that you're looking at some real damage.

So that was my choice.

So there's really only one choice there.

Right?

Right.

Wow.

And knowing that the outcome might still be that you can't paint any longer,

but at the time I have another good friend in Chicago and people in Chicago will know

his name because he is the singer for the Cubs.

He sings the national Anthem and his name is Wayne Messmer and he faced some really

incredible fears about 20 years ago, give or take, I don't remember the exact date, but in a

robbery attempt, he was shot through the throat.

Oh my gosh.

And he made a miraculous comeback and they thought he might never speak again, but not

only did he speak, he regained his singing voice and went right back to that career he loved.

So I knew Wayne.

I, I didn't know that I had been a part of his recovery from that until I read his book.

I knew that he knew something about this and I thought, okay, I'm going to ask Wayne.

And I reached out to him in an email and he wrote back to me and said, my dear,

Jennifer, you're too good to lose your talent.

And if doing the surgery is something you must do to save your talent, then you should go for it.

And he said, I was sitting here just the other day, having lunch with, oh gosh.

And the name went out of my head, the guy who had elbow surgery, baseball player to save his ability to pitch.

He was losing that.

And they, this was the first time that surgery was done.

He was having lunch with that guy just the other day.

And he said, you reaching out to me and me having lunch with him was not a coincidence.

He said that there was a reason for that.

So somehow he got the vibes or the energy somewhere through knowing me.

And he gave me great advice and said, you can do this and basically go for it.

But you can either go through something and just kind of.

I don't know, let it affect you.

feel like you're adrift or you can embrace it.

And I feel like when you embrace something, you help direct your healing.

So you have to go into these situations believing you're going to come out victorious

and that you're going to have a recovery.

And if you play your cards right, then you find the right surgeons who are the very skilled surgeons.

And you find you get into it far enough that they understand in detail what the

issue is that they're trying to fix.

You've got a much better chance of that great recovery that's enough.

Yes.

That's really what I did and goingto Mayo.

So

you got that help that you needed.

Exactly.

We had a great team and I looked at myself as part of the surgical team.

I'm as much a part of this team as they are, and they can't do it without me.

Right.

So that's how I looked at it.

So you have such a wonderful attitude towards all of this and just a great way to help

people walk their own path into the operating room.

And so I went through the surgery and it was before we went to surgery, it was very important

for me to express my gratitude to the surgeon.

I asked him to come see me beforehand.

And he did, and I held his hand.

I looked right in his eyes and I said, thank you, but your hands are going to save my hands today.

And I really appreciate that.

So that's how we went into surgery, you know, with that in my heart.

Him knowing he's appreciated him feeling good.

Right.

Because I think that helps you have a better outcome too.

They're professionals, but everybody needs recognition.

Everybody needs to be appreciated.

That's true.

And they know that they're under pressure, but you're right.

And they do need that recognition.

My husband and I, we always bring in like spatulas that say something on it and give them, or some

other cooking thing because they probably cook.

Yeah.I'm not a painter, , so,

okay.

But then, so I had the surgery and it wasn't nearly as bad as I had imagined it

would be, you know, so any good surgeon.

I had an excellent surgeon and yes, you're going to have some pain.

You're going to have some discomfort.

My neck was actually weak at the time.

I had worn , a neck brace for three months because I didn't want hardware placed on my spine.

And the surgeon agreed that I could have a fusion with no hardware.

If I stayed in the neck brace until it fused.

Oh,

my gosh, that gives me weebie geebies

bone graft.

Yeah.

Oh,

wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

And then that's a decision you make too.

Cause there's a lot of people who can't stand the neck brace.

Can't stand to be confined.

As human beings as soon as somebody tells us, you have to be confined the first thing

we want to do is break out right here right now because we're quarantining a home.

Right.

You had to stay home.

You'd be happy at home, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, you're delightful.

And you're so remarkable with what you've been through, but it's, but the attitude and what you take from

it, but also what you give back from your experiences

on Mayo clinic connect.

And that's a patient forum on Mayo clinic where.

Patients can talk to each other, you know, and there's a core of patients who been

Mayo patients, but anybody can go on there.

You don't need to be a male patient and you can start your own discussion topic.

Or there's a lot of ones on there and it's moderated, there's a director and moderator.

So it's a safe place to talk about stuff.

You don't have to give your real name, but we can all learn.

And patients certainly learn from each other's experience.

So I've been able to share my experience.

Uh, of spine surgery, what I learned, uh, as well as everything else, I have my biology background and

I've learned a lot as an advocate for my my parents.

So those are the things I try to teach people to, to first of all, explain something they

don't understand about medical problems.

Not that I'm a doctor or an expert, and to teach patients how to face their fear.

Cause a lot of people facing surgery or medical.

Problem are fearful.

So to help them cope with it, and also the teach them how to advocate, because if you

don't know how to advocate for yourself, you're kind of like a boat adrift out there

and if you're not in front of the right doctor who takes you in and says, Hey, you know, this is

what you need . You know, give you a direction.

You may never get the answers that you need.

So, you know, and this is part of our power that we have as patients.

If we do this right, to advocate, and I'm not talking about harassing doctors, I'm

talking about asking intelligent questions.

If you know enough about a subject to ask an intelligent question of doctor, they can think about

what your future would be and how you might alter that.

And it's something that doctors don't always have time for because they're so busy in the

short amount of time they see you in the office.

Things don't always come up and sometimes they're just trying to ease your pain with

medication or ease your symptoms rather than ask the questions of why is that happening?

And is there another choice, another way that you could prevent that?

So that's kind of what I do,

Jennifer.

There's no better person than to do that.

I'm so glad you're doing that for the patients there at Mayo and I'm sure Mayo clinic is just thrilled to

have you as a volunteer, working with the patients.

Well, thank you so much for doing that.

During

my rehab.

I had to wonder, can I still do it right?

Am I going to get my talent back?

I, you know, I had lost a lot of muscle.

My arms were weak and I was going through rehab.

It took a lot to get that back.

So I wanted more than anything to do a painting of my surgeon.

Oh wow.

As a gift for a couple of reasons.

Okay.

I, you know, when somebody rescues you when you can't rescue yourself, right.

And somebody comes to your rescue after so many others refused, you have extreme gratitude for that person.

So that's the first thing.

And he was a humble guy.

It's not something he ever would have expected or asked for.

And I also had to prove to myself that I could do it.

You set that goal, there's a mountain.

You're going to go climb it, to see if you can do it to prove you can do it.

And so that was my first painting.

Post-op for my spine surgery was his painting.

He's in front of a historic building at Mayo clinic with all the carved figures on the doors.

That building actually represents the history of Mayo clinic in all the figures that are on those doors.

That's named after one of their doctors from back in history, Dr.

Henry Stanley Plummer and you know, there's even initials carved in that door like CM

for Charlie Mayo, Charlie, and Will Mayo were the sons of the original doctorMayo.

They became doctors, you know, they're what brought Mayo clinic forward to what it is today

and created it as a very successful entity.

So that history is there.

And then my surgeon at Mayo, who's Dr.

Jeremy Fogelson, he trained at Mayo.

He did his neurosurgical surgical training at Mayo, and he also teaches there.

So I thought the best way to represent that is to put him literally in front of those historic doors.

They're absolutely amazing.

The detail that you have,

and then it set a nice stage color-wise because he's in blue scrubs and

his white lab coat, and then you have all that beautiful bronze color in the background.

I showed up with my camera.

And asked him if I could do this.

And he was like, well, all right, but if it's too much, you don't have to do it.

And so I started taking some pictures and here's the really funny part.

He started strutting around the room, like a model,

I couldn't stop laughing but that's the kind of guy down to earth and funny, and just a regular guy.

Right, right.

I see, it helps me to think of people as humans and not as surgeons.

Sure.

And we ha we had a great connection.

When I came back to my one-year followup at Mayo, I had this painting, unfortunately,

the frame had been damaged in shipping.

So I'm going to see the surgeon with his portrait, right.

Hidden behind a curtain so that we can have a big unveiling.

And so we got through the medical part of my appointment first, and then we

unveiled it and the look on his face.

You know, he was like a kid at Christmas, so big that his eyes got real squinty and he had dimples.

Looking at it and smiling and posing with it and looking

at, so, yeah, Jennifer, you have an amazing story and your doctors' positive imprints really have.

Uh, been an inspiration for you as well within your own life.

So those positive imprints just go round andMack bailey had those positive imprints with you.

And so it's just, uh, it's just amazing.

So I, with the lost and found painting, which I guess you were never lost.

I want to move on to that because it's another incredible title and it's another one of your Western

american history type paintings, and it's kind of a, heart-wrenching emotional painting.

What's the story behind this.

And if you could kind of describe what is in the painting.

Okay.

That's an oil painting and that's also Chief David Bald Eagle and

the woman in the painting is his daughter.

And that is their story.

As a young child as a toddler.

Her mother gave her up for adoption.

So they're born on the reservation and then there are problems on the reservation with

poverty and all kinds of social issues.

So I think a lot of Indian children have been given up for adoption for that reason.

And she was, I think, close to three.

She told me her story one day.

She had been given up for adoption and had been adopted out to a family and had not been treated well.

They forced her to cut her hair.

If you're native American and someone forces you to do that and just tries to turn you into something

that you're not, that really hurts you very deeply.

And so she grew up not even knowing who her father was.

And as an adult, she started looking for her birth parents and she found out her mother had passed, but

she found out that David bald Eagle was her father.

And I think at the time he was not a chief.

He had not been picked to be a chief, but she reconnected with him and together they would

go to schools and give talks and educate.

You know, grade school children.

So she is a good friend of mine.

And when she told me that story around the fire, in the teepee, she was crying, I was crying.

We came out of that teepee and I hugged her and I said, I'll be your sister.

So

that's sweet Jennifer.

So we call each other sister, even though there was no blood

relationship, but she was a lost person.

And she found her father.

And so there's that aspect of that painting.

But at the same time, her father is very aged and is slowly slipping away.

And so it's trying to hold onto that connection between the generations.

So that's her story.

I know a lot of people can relate to that, even if you're not adopted there's many

times that you can feel lost for some reason.

Yes.

Well, this painting is absolutely beautiful and it really captures the emotion completely.

Oh wow.

It does.

What a nice job, Jennifer, in being set in, continuing with your sensitivity, of course, and, but

capturing those emotional parts so that when people do look at that, they may not know the story, but

they see the pain, but they also see something more in that picture.

And like you said, you can look at something and you get lost in it.

And so we can get lost in our own story that we would want to tell with regard to

what you have provided with your brush.

And then I started a website.

There's actually two, the one that is my fine art is Jenniferhunter.co so C like Colorado

and the website for the inspirational stories

like what we've been talking about today that have to do with overcoming fears and adversity in life.

And that's called artforhopeandhealing.com.

And can

anybody, uh, submit their stories?

I'd love to hear from people it's not limited to, you have to be an artist to have a story.

So, Jennifer, I always like to end the show with some last inspiring words and I

know you're going to have something so wonderful.

Jennifer

At the time I was going through all this fear and four months of

waking up every day and having a panic attack.

That was when I asked myself the question.

Why am I doing this to myself?

So I started asking myself those kinds of questions.

And then I realized I had within myself the skills and the ability to figure things out.

That's something that I feel like anyone can do if they just get themselves quiet

enough to listen to their inner voice.

So that inner voice is there to guide you.

To help you through the tough time to bring you joy at times, to creativity, all that stuff.

That brings you, such a joy and a connectedness in your life that you just, I know it's hard to describe what

that is, but that gives you such a good feeling about living and all the things that we as human beings do.

And I kind of feel like.

If all of us individually could connect to our inner voice together as a society and a people and a

nation, we can really accomplish a lot of good things.

If we could tap into that creativity and the value that we have, but we have to see

the value within ourselves before we can go out and see the value every place else.

We all are walking a different path through life.

We have different experiences and you learn different things.

So we come with our own story and we've learned something.

So by telling these stories and hearing someone else's perspective, we can learn an awful lot.

And that might benefit me when I hear somebody else's story about how they did

something and what gave them meaning.

And you never know where that's going to come from.

As much as there is pain, there's beauty,

Jennifer, you are so amazing with your positive imprints and you are certainly a

voice for those who are not only long gone, but a voice and a storyteller for those of today.

Jennifer Hunter, you heal from everything with how you are embracing it and your positive attitude.

And I thank you so much for the positive imprints that you are providing to everybody.

Thank you, Jennifer.

Thank you.

Catherine Your positive imprint.