Having been raised on the Monterey Peninsula and spending her teenage years living in Carmel, California, instilled in Jessica a great love of the natural world and a compelling need to record the beauty of the California landscape. After graduating from high school, Jessica relocated to San Francisco and enrolled in San Francisco State University to study painting. She graduated from the university in 2001, earning a Bachelor of Arts Degree with an emphasis in painting.
Jessica's great love of the natural world provides her with an endless amount of inspiration for her artwork. Almost everywhere she looks, she sees a painting. She finds great joy in the process of painting, sometimes leaving thick areas of paint in certain places on the canvas which creates texture in her work. Jessica mostly paints in oil paint, but also enjoys painting small works in watercolor, often using these smaller works as studies for her larger paintings. Jessica enjoys the immediacy of watercolor, how it can be taken out and worked with in a very short amount of time and how it dries quickly. When she paints in oil, which she does with all of her larger paintings, she paints in her studio in Southern California. She will then use reference photographs which she takes herself on location. "Every painting is evoked by a memory or a place that has touched my heart. I love how the viewer then looks at my artwork and it invokes a feeling in them of a time or place. This is a shared connection that I enjoy very much."
In 2004, Jessica moved to Southern California to enjoy the sunshine and the beaches of this beautiful region. Since 2005, she has been working at the breathtaking Getty Villa Museum in Malibu, where she is a museum operations manager. This has allowed her to be in daily contact with some of the most impressive artwork ever created. Being able to peruse the galleries daily and appreciate the great works of art on a closeup and personal level has made her own work more rich and varied. Being able to contribute to arts awareness and arts education through her work at the Getty has enriched Jessica's life greatly.
Jessica is drawn to painting the California landscape, especially the ocean and all things involving water. Next to light, water is the most beloved subject of hers to paint. She loves that light is not that by which we see, but rather, that by which we see everything else. And the flow of water is both meditative and hypnotic in its form, or lack thereof. She loves the way that water is both representational and abstract in its form.
Jessica has been featured in multiple publications, including most recently in the September, 2018 issue of Victoria magazine, where her artwork was featured in their "Favorite Things" column. Jessica became a member of the Malibu Art Association in 2021. She has been selling her artwork online for several years, being collected in private collections throughout the United States and France.
