Art Inspiration
I seem to be spending a lot of my time above the world at the moment travelling from my Sussex home to my Hong Kong home. From an airplane, there is such tranquility and peace watching the cloud formations drift and reform. I have definitely been inspired by my sky high views and when I’m back in my studio I have been recreating the dreams and experiences I have been so immersed in. Working with oils on large abstracts has been incredibly exciting and I always relish the opportunity painting offers to process and translate my travels onto canvas!
A day in the life of an artist
As a painter my work is very solitary, allowing me to be completely self-indulgent. I think that because the whole process brings me so much joy, people can see and feel it in my pieces. It makes them smile, and that’s my mission in life: to create beauty and lift people’s spirits. I am motivated to add a moment to someone’s day when they are able to lose themselves in something lovely.
My process is quite time-consuming; paintings can take years to complete! I build up layers and layers, scrape back through them, build them up again, and then scrape again. The paintings ask you to stop and look, to stand still and really lose yourself in them; then you start to see back through the layers and feel the little bits that have become lost, hidden behind the larger picture.
I get up around 5:30 every morning and tend to the business side of things. When I get out into my studio the hours just fly by. I become completely consumed by my work. I work on many canvases at a time. I paint a new layer on one, and then move to the next, and then the next. And by the time I’m working on painting number 10, I need to go back to the first one and start all over. When I spend so much time on a painting, building up a relationship, it can be hard to describe the knowing when a piece is complete. I wait until I’m completely in love with a piece, until I really don’t want to let it go, and then I know it’s finally finished. I feel like my work is a gift, a blessing I’ve been given. It is such a strange thing because I get so lost when creating, that when I stand back and look at a finished piece, I don’t even know how I made it.
Always focus on the positive
I am in such a happy place in my life, so I’m going to paint happiness. I think that if you really believe and wish for things, that dreams can come true. I know, because it’s happened to me!
Jessica x