Janet Eager Krueger

Janet Eager Krueger, a mother, rancher and 27-year resident of nearby Encinal, is the 2008 Texas State Artist of the Year."I was kind of blindsided when they called to tell me; I feel very excited and surprised because I never think of myself in those terms," Krueger, 54, said last week.
...
Krueger was appointed to the one-year post by the Texas Commission on the Arts because of her "years of excellence and dedicated commitment to the arts in Texas," according to the commission's announcement.
...
"She gives such a pure and honest portrayal of the South Texas landscape, and she honors livestock with such majesty and respect," said Carrington Foultz, who first met Krueger when the artist was pursuing her Master of Arts degree in painting at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the late 1990s.
...
Krueger was born into a family where art was appreciated and encouraged.
...
Krueger was graduated from Alamo Heights, an affluent San Antonio high school, and then UT-Austin with a bachelor's degree in art history in 1975.

Right out of college, the Texas Commission for the Arts hired her as an artist-in-residence for a College Station school district, and Krueger would also become slide curator at Texas A,s architecture department.

She moved to Encinal in 1980 after she and George, a former high school classmate, married.

The former "hippie" soon fell in love with Encinal ranch life , she knew Spanish, was "a horse nut," and had worked for a large-animal veterinarian in San Antonio.

"It was heaven," Krueger said."I had landed in the perfect place."

She became a painting and figure-drawing instructor at Laredo Community College, and began painting the world around her in rural Encinal.

Krueger said she began with oil paintings, working off her photographs of the ranch.She moved on to drawing and sketching with color pencils after she had children.

A defining moment occurred in the mid- to late-1980s when Krueger developed an unusual embossing technique with her color pencils.The process made her work stand out from others in the same medium.

Krueger also moved away from photographs, and began doing much larger drawings with a more imaginative and narrative quality.She also resumed working in oils.

By 1996, Krueger had to deal with a dilemma.

"We were in the midst of a severe drought, the kids were getting ready to go into middle schools, ranching was in the tank, rain had fallen and everything was bad financially speaking," she said."Looking down the road at putting two kids through college, I told George I needed to go back to school and get a master's degree."

She enrolled at UTSA and would spend most of each week in San Antonio for the next two years.The sacrifice and time away from her family would soon provide benefits.

"School opened up an enormous world for me in every direction," she said, "with contacts, with friends, with a new perspective on how to talk about art and with a whole new validation for myself as an artist.

"It was thrilling,"

Krueger was taken under the wing of mentor Charles Field, an art professor and landscape artist who introduced her to Carrington Foultz.
...
"I've worked really hard all the time," Krueger said."It's not easy, but it's the kind of hard work that makes you feel good when you do it," She added the rewarding sense of accomplishment is something she tries constantly to impress upon her art students.

Viewed by some as a "regionalist" with a sophisticated point of view, Krueger said she often finds herself straddling "a certain kind of urban sensibility with a rural sensibility."

"I see both sides and that's what I try to represent," she said.