Artist Statement

Often, I find myself standing somewhere gawking, trying to decipher the light in the clouds, the shadows on the side of a hill, or the colors in the moving ocean. Landscape painting is for me a way of spending time with, understanding, and loving the places that mean the most to me. The urge to paint comes straight out of a kind of ecstatic reverence for the natural world. When I was a kid, ten or eleven years old, I lived on the East Coast.  The school bus stop was a half-mile walk away, past fields and through a wood. There were times in the winter when there was snow on the ground but an early thaw, and the shafts of morning sun would filter down pinkly through the bare trees while a blue mist would rise from the melting snow, and I would compose euphoric odes to the woods in my head.  Atmospheric conditions, light and shadow, and reflections are central to my paintings. I am fascinated by all the ways the thin veil of our atmosphere captures and scatters light. I paint as an emotional response to these phenomena.

Being in nature is a reminder for me to be in the present moment, to fully experience that moment, and the beauty of this planet. Painting for me is a way of sitting in a single moment for longer, extending it and feeling it more deeply. It lets me look for longer, lets me better understand what I am seeing, and be with it for more than just a fleeting minute. When I am painting, time doesn’t seem to slide through my fingers like sand. 

Of course, a painting of a cloud-filled sky, say, is not the same thing as the sky itself. But the process of painting is a ritual conjuring of a time and place, and a certain light. The painting itself has a totemic quality for me. Something that points to the profound experience of a particular moment. While I am not religious, the act of painting is, along with the pleasure of the craft and the simple labor of it, a kind of devotional act. When a painting is working, there is a moment when the light comes to life and takes me to a place. People often comment that my paintings look very real.  I am not particularly interested in realism, and my technique is not realism, but I think fidelity to light is what makes the paintings feel this way. If I have been able to take the viewer to a place to experience that light, I feel I have done my job. 

On another level, I paint landscapes in part in response to the climate crisis. Painting landscapes and skyscapes for me is a kind of love letter to the planet at a time when the Earth as we know it is in jeopardy. It is a way of processing the beauty, the poignance, and the emotional power of our fragile world in the face of uncertainty.

I come from a family of artists and writers. My education is in art history and film. I have been a landscape designer for twenty-five years, as well as a painter. My home is in Santa Barbara with my husband, Michael, and my two sons, Oliver and Eli.

Contact:
jessbortman@gmail.com