Biography
Jesse Gander is a self-taught artist who began drawing when he was a child. He clearly remembers his elementary school classmates standing around his desk admiring his drawings. Jesse continued to develop his drawing skills and won awards for his pencil art and architecture drawings while in high school.
While in high school, Jesse also used his drawing skills to design a cabin cruiser that he built with a friend, Randy Craig, a boat that could entertain many on an excursion due to its overall length of 29 feet. This boat not only had lots of use on Madison area lakes but also took a weeklong trip down the Mississippi River to Iowa.
After high school, Jesse enrolled in Madison Area Technical College. After graduating with a two-year degree in Mechanical Design in 1989, he worked for the following five years for an electrical engineering firm in his field of study.
Halfway through technical school, Jesse began playing with car styling and started building a sports car with a friend, Alan Chong, that was his own design. Over four years later, the car was finished and was called the
Edge
. Jesse and Alan enjoyed displaying the car in shows, driving it in parades, and just touring the country roads. An article on this car can be found in the December 1995 issue of Car and Driver magazine.
A couple years after getting married in 1991, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin–Madison school of engineering at the encouragement of his wife. Even after the birth of their first child, Joshua, he continued to work hard to graduate the following year and finished with a ranking of 4/289 in his class. He went on to graduate school and received a masters degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1996. It was this year that he and his wife had their second child, Rachel.
After working for 10 years at Oshkosh Truck Corporation as a mechanical engineer, working tirelessly to restore his late 1800’s-early 1900’s house and farm buildings, and most importantly, along with his wife, raising his family of three children (daughter Rebekah was born), he is feeling the call to again use his talents as an artist.
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