Artist Jenny Kelley’s brushstrokes are a thing of beauty, and she’s just getting started.

Henry James famously said that a writer is, “someone on whom nothing is lost.” The same could be said of painter Jenny Kelley. In an artistic career that has moved from an early interest in portraiture to what could be described as exquisitely rendered portraits of flowers, Jenny has found that her greatest strength is her capacity to be “infinitely inspired.” Whether she’s browsing in the local garden center, or walking through the MFA, looking at fabrics in the Design Center in Boston or sorting her daughter’s socks, Jenny is alert to the colors and textures of the world around her, always open to the ways that anything can serve as an inspiration for new work.

A Cape Cod native, Jenny grew up in Marstons Mills and attended Barnstable High School, where she was fortunate to study with Carl Lopes, whom she credits as a continuing influence. “I learned more in his classes than I did in four years at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design),” she says, “he’s an inspiring man.” That inspiration led her to study painting at RISD, where she completed her senior thesis in portraiture and planned to make portraiture the focus of her work. But after she left school, she found herself frustrated by the challenge of finding models and establishing herself as a portrait painter. Reflecting on that time, she acknowledges that while “certain people” may be able to sustain themselves with that focus, it’s far more likely in a busy urban setting than on Cape Cod. But when her husband suggested in 2011 that she try...