Landscape painting


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UP Lighthouse 2 Jens Carstensen Michigan, circa 2000 Oil on canvas 2009.039.001 - Museum purchase made possible by Dennis Anderson


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Jens Carstensen has always drawn but it was during a sabbatical to Paris in 1977 that got him interested in painting. According to himself there hasn’t gone a day since he hadn’t drawn or painted something. When he came back from Paris he got acquainted with oil painter, Elton Krafft, who became his mentor. Jens Carstensen is mainly a landscape painter, with the beautiful landscape in Wisconsin as his primary subject. The Wisconsin landscape reminds him about the landscape from his childhood in Denmark.

Jens Carstensen was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1926. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Denmark, where his father came from. The first three years in Denmark the family lived in the Northern part of Jutland called Vendsyssel. They then moved to Sjaelland. Jens Carstensen got a degree from Denmark’s Technical University in 1950, at which point he decided to go back to America. He got a job in the pharmaceutical industry where he worked for 17 years. He then got offered a job at the University of Wisconsin, which he took and stay there till his retirement in 1997.


  • Landscape