Reviews

“Demolition Day,” Oil on Canvas, 36×26″

Amidst the steady work Jessica Hess has been putting in for her solo show at White Walls, she still found the time to answer our questions about the body of work she’ll be presenting in It Finds You, opening Saturday, September 3rd, 7-11pm. From the age of 11 Hess has been painting with oils, beginning from the start with the set intention of becoming an artist. Such clarity on one’s future at a young age is rare. Maintaining unswerving dedication to a career that demands so much from a person is even more rare; Hess not only has done both, but has excelled at each. Her artistry is evident in a look at any of her paintings, all of which feature urban landscapes rendered in a way that seems almost loving in it’s attention to detail and light. Graffiti-adorned alleyways, underpasses, and hollowed out buildings become the aesthetic focus in Hess’ painting, rather than just being the type of scenes many of us most commonly ignore. Through her personal exploration and documentation of places that have been left to fall apart and be forgotten, Hess creates paintings that bring out the beauty of structures in disrepair, highlighting just how street art and graffiti breathe a new life into them.

Read Jessica Hess’ Full Interview After the Jump!

1. You grew up in the South, spent five years in Providence, R.I., attended the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003, and then moved around a bit. How and why did your travels lead you to San Francisco?

I had a crisis of “home” until I was thirty years old. My crisis ended when I arrived permanently in San Francisco. I said for years that while I may be renting an apartment in Providence or Boston or wherever, I am “homeless”. You see, if home is where the heart is, then I left my heart in San Francisco in 2001, the first time I visited the city. I lived in so many places and was just sick of not fitting in and being uninspired. I always loved San Francisco. My best friend from college moved here right after graduation and it took me seven years after that to get up the courage to make the cross-country move myself. I am glad I did. I finally feel at home here.

2. At what age did you first get interested in art? Do you remember what your first paintings were of?

I have always been interested in art. I was drawing and painting as a young child, making silly pictures of what kids do. My first serious works were when I began to take oil painting classes at age eleven. It is funny to think of an eleven year old making serious works but oil is a serious medium and I was not your average child. I studied the old masters techniques with a private instructor painting portraits and landscapes. I always knew I wanted to be an artist, this I never gave a second thought to. When high school graduation drew near I remember friends of mine worrying about what they wanted to do with their lives and where to go to college. I knew without a doubt I would be an artist. It was so clear to me that I only applied to one school, The Rhode Island School of Design.

“Allston Trespass,” Oil on Canvas, 12.25×24″

3. Do you think that spending so much time looking at places that have been abandoned, forgotten or unattended, has given you a new way to look at the world? Do you notice these places more in your everyday life?

Making art is one of the loneliest things a person can do. I spend a crazy amount of time alone in my studio making work. Every inch of every canvas is evidence of time passing and recorded, my life in inches. It is fitting that my subjects are also lonely. But it is not so sad as my street art laden subjects show all the marks left by other artists. Even on an empty street at night I find the graffiti comforting. I am participating in what I see as the greatest public art collaboration ever by making paintings of street art covered locations. You have the architect who designed the building, the street artists that alter its surface, Mother Nature tearing it all down, and me, taking it all in. These locations are really all I notice in a city. I am not your typical tourist. I go right to the worst neighborhoods and industrial wastelands on the outskirts of town.

4. Your paintings often make me think of the return of nature to man-made constructions, weeds pushing through crumbling concrete or rust spreading down steel, but the focus on the street art at these locations also shows the clear presence of society. What first drew your interest into the areas you choose to paint?

Decay, disuse, and disrepair all lead to abstractions of architecture. I am increasingly interested in demolition as a means of physical abstraction of architecture. Graffiti is just one more layer altering the surface these buildings. Eventually my art will explore this even more. I am very attracted to the idea of nature reclaiming structures. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen was a snow filled room in the top floor of a warehouse where the skylights had been smashed. It was the perfect combination of nature and manmade structure.

As far as how I find my subjects, they find me. Hence the title of my show at White Walls “It Finds You”.

5. What determines how faithful you stay to portraying a specific place? Do you consciously decide to add in or remove any certain elements?

I am not often faithful to the original architecture. It is rare that I find a subject that is just perfect the way it actually exists. I alter the buildings and the lighting. I remove trash, cars, and people from my works but I am respectful in regards to the representation of graffiti and street art in my paintings. I am very aware that I am using another artist’s work in my own and do with fidelity and admiration.

6. How has street art informed your personal artistic aesthetic? Have you ever used spray paint in any pieces?

Nope. I am a classical painter. I love spray paint but I am terrible with a can. My strength lies in recreating spray painted elements in oil, acrylic, and gouache. I love street art and collect it when I can. Usually this means photographing it all over the city but sometimes I actually get work from artists and it overfills my apartment.

“Bayview II,” Oil on Canvas, 24×44″

7. The widespread and generalized economic decline that has created a lot of worry for many Americans. How do you think your work is affected, if at all, by the surrounding issues of this?

Starving artists are not just clichés or myths. Just look in my refrigerator. In a bad economy where people are clutching their purse strings luxury items are the first to go. Art is the ultimate luxury both the creation of it and collecting of it.

I have sacrificed a lot of things that people take for granted just to keep making art in these past few years. It is not glamorous or romantic; it is just the way it is. But I am stubborn and determined to not let this horrible economy keep me from being who I am or doing what I love.

8. What do you think comprises the beauty of the sites that inspire your art? How does it differ from traditional notions of beauty?

I do not have traditional notions of beauty in my art or otherwise. My subjects appeal to me because they are imperfect. The things that contribute to a building’s appeal are the same things that city planners and upright citizens try to snuff out of their communities. I have to find my locations before they get to them. I have lost count of how many of my subjects have undergone renovation or demolition and redevelopment after I paint them. It is sad. In this way I am a documentarian of a disappearing America.

9. Looking at your work often allows people to see parts of a city that are seldom seen, or are on the peripheral of most residents’ view. Have you always been drawn to exploring? Has this off-the-beaten-trail approach ever landed you in any precarious spots?

I do love exploring but let’s put it this way… It is rare that I paint night scenes. I have taken to bringing a “bodyguard” with me so to speak when exploring bad parts of town. I am aware of my physical limitations as a girl. I am also cautious when carrying my camera around these questionable parts of town. I have had run-ins with crack heads and crazies. I have been chased and harassed. Even the police are often less than understanding of my intentions. It is difficult to explain to an officer how the beauty of the sunset caught your eye on the white storage containers at the oil refinery. All he sees is a trespassing terrorist, though I don’t exactly fit the bill, I have been interrogated just the same. Cops are not often the most creative people.

10. You always seem to be keeping busy, to put it lightly. Any projects coming up? Specific goals for the upcoming year?

So much to do, so little time. I have projects planned well into the new year. I have hundreds of photos and subjects that I have not had time to work with before my big solo show at White Walls. I plan to keep on painting right after my show in September and already have my next dozen works planned out in my mind. I will take the month of October off to make a killer Halloween costume however. I will enjoy a little break from the painting to do some sewing for my favorite holiday of the year.

It Finds You opens Saturday, September 3rd at White Walls from 7-11pm.

Dig In Magazine Interview with Artist, Jessica Hess August 1, 2011

Dig In Magazine: Where are you originally from and where are you currently based?

Jessica Hess: I was born in Massachusetts, raised in North Carolina, schooled in Rhode Island, and finally enjoying San Francisco, California.

JH: Officially I attended the Rhode Island School of Design but that is not where I learned to paint. I have very supportive parents who had signed me up for watercolor class when I was five years old and oil paintings lessons by age eleven. I had a private painting instructor for ten years before RISD. I also studied etching and darkroom photography before college.

JH: My whole life. I remember the first time I got in trouble in school. I snuck back indoors during recess to draw instead of playing with the other children. That was preschool... story of my life. The second time I was in first grade when my parents received a letter insisting that I not write in cursive because the students had not been taught that yet. Oops. My mother had taught me early because I thought it was so pretty. By third grade the letters complained of my anatomically correct drawings of mermaids and so on...

JH: I paint urban decay. Usually this means architectural landscapes but more recently the work has grown to include broken down vehicles, scrap yards, demolition sites and more. Most things I gravitate to are at least covered in a layer of rust and often layers of colorful graffiti.

JH: My style is realistic but not photorealistic. When viewed in person the paintings are obviously just that, paintings. But to the average internet surfer my work comes across as photographs. I am tight but I assure you there are about a hundred extra hours between my surfaces and those of the texture-obsessed, highly polished, photo realists. What can I say? I just don't get that excited about chrome. It is not that I can't. I just don't see the point of re-creating a photo.

JH: New York, Boston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Providence, Miami, Montreal Canada, and West Melbourne Australia.

JH: I have been featured in New American Paintings. My work was spotlighted in Harper's Magazine and Broken Meter. I also illustrate for SF Weekly and can be seen there sometimes.

JH: I am a big fan and supporter of street art. Let's face it. Most of my paintings would be really boring without it. I enjoy the contrast of these quiet vacant locations with the loud busyness of the marks left by other artists. Graffiti adds so much life to the city even when there is no one on the street. It is very comforting to see.

JH: Observation. I am skilled in the art of being a human copy machine but watching an artist work with spray paint, seeing how it drips and fans out, is most informative. The key is painting the layers the same order in which the layers of graffiti coated the surfaces.

JH: Oil on canvas is most vibrant, smooth, and forgiving. I also enjoy using gouache on paper. Gouache colors are bright and even like a good silkscreen print. Gouaches quick drying time is a nice change from the slower drying oil paint. I can make an oil painting in a month but sometimes it is nice to feel more productive and finish a gouache painting in a day. I use acrylic sometimes but we don't get along so well.

DIM: I understand that your process begins with a photograph, can you expand on the process of creating an art piece from idea to final painting?

JH: I always have my camera with me. If I see a subject that excites me I photograph it. I shoot upwards of 10,000 photos a year. Seriously, I have the back-up drives to prove it. My paintings are informed by anywhere from one to a hundred photographs. I often change things around as my use of photo references is quite aggressive. I have been known to shoot something during the day but make a painting of it at night. Doors and windows get moved around and sometimes I knock off whole stories from buildings. Trash is always removed from my paintings because I hate litterbugs. I also hate cars in landscapes. Unless a vehicle is the subject of a painting it will not be included in a painting. Every painting begins with a photo and ends with being photographed.

DIM: Who are the artists, living or dead, who have had the greatest influence on you?

JH: I love David Schnell. Lucky for us all he is still alive and part of the contemporary German Leipzig School.

DIM: What art did you contribute to "Paint It Now III" in Brooklyn, New York at Fowler Arts Collective?

JH: I sometimes take a break from the landscape painting and make drawings of naked women with rooster heads. I call them my "Cocky Girls". They comment on gender bending and arrogance. As a female in the arts I can safely say that there aren't enough females in the arts. Rather, it is difficult because the art world is such a boys club. Graffiti is also a boys club. This would be a good time to mention that I am currently the only female artist represented by White Walls Gallery. So... in my spare time I present ladies...naked ones.

DIM: I understand that you created and painted some porcelain spray paint cans, which were featured in various shows across the nation, can you tell me a bit about these art pieces in terms of what they are, what they symbolize, the inspiration behind them, and what exhibitions they were featured in?

JH: The cans came to be as a result of Leslie Ferrin, owner of Ferrin Gallery, having introduced sculptor Christa Assad to me. The cans are collaborative works and are the brainchild of Ferrin. She represents both Assad and me in her Western Massachusetts Gallery and she thought "Hey, I have a sculptor who doesn't enjoy painting surfaces and I have a painter who is looking to branch out into 3-D." The subject matter we already had in common. Christa was making porcelain spray cans and my paintings focused on spray can art. Naturally, we got along. The spray can is iconic of the entire street art genre and is a symbol of free speech and rebellion. Our collaborations have been a breath of fresh air for both of us and our sculptures have travelled to several major art fairs including SOFA New York and ArtMRKT San Francisco.

DIM: What are you presenting at "It Finds You," your solo exhibition at White Walls in San Francisco in September?

JH: The show will feature the ongoing evolution of street art in my landscapes. My work is increasingly better informed as I get more involved with the street art community and get to know these artists. My newest works are growing, literally, and the show will feature my largest oil paintings to date. The show will include oil paintings (large and small), gouache paintings, the can collaborations, and even a couple of photographs.

DIM: What are your plans for the future in terms of your artwork and art career?

JH: My plan, and the best advice I can give any artist, is just to keep on making art.

Temporal Surfaces
White Walls Gallery
835 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA 94109
March 6, 2010 - March 27, 2010

White Walls' walls are whiter than usual lately. Temporal Surfaces was retired last weekend--you might say prophetically--so as the art commanded a once-removed affect, so will my post-mortem. Once-removed? These are paintings of the already-painted, an update to a long tradition dating back to the salon and beyond. Kevin Cyr and Jessica Hess are the two vandals-by-proxy, and they evince their appreciation for urban decay contrastingly. Their one binding agent is the strict avoidance of traditional spray cans and markers, opting instead to transform or at least translate the source media. The relatively small scale at play, and lavish detail within, seems to have driven the shift to more delicate tools.

Kevin Cyr is a van man, an enthusiast...or at least a completist. His 5x4 matrix of 1980s conversion vans is painstakingly rendered in exterior detail, slavish down to the rear windows, door handles, reflectors, and turn signal placements of particular models. Collect 'em all! Instead of spiriting Warhol's mechanical monotony, these 20 wooden panels embrace their unique man-made skins. So consistently rendered in profile view, it's the van, rather than the panel, that becomes the canvas. It's a vanvas. It's jarring how Cyr mimicked this mode across the gallery using model vans, first finely painted (What? With a one-hair brush?) then photographed familiarly as a profile. Each model, posed on the slight jut of a simple ledge, stood before its pinup photograph. I gained a strange distrust of his imagery from these pieces. How could I anymore assume the existence of those first twenty vans? It was unsettling, and more gripping because of it--kinda like this.

Unlike Cyr, Jessica Hess charts the deep, layered world, not the transient vanvases that pass through it. On canvas (and less effectively, on paper) she radiates the fever of process colors on the squalor of urbanity. Shock-red dashes through a puddle. Flecks of aqua and sea green glimmer off wet dirt in a vacant lot. Deep teal floods across a wooden floor. Decay is highlighted here by its improvement at Hess's hand, the piles of bricks, dirt, and drywall, piling and reaching for the angle of repose. In one piece, Pittsfield Tracks I, even the foreground rust is electric. Conversely, the untouched, verdant background fades to a patina of sepia. Human presence seems to activate her spaces.

Then there's her handling of graffiti. Spray paint drips are brushed, depicted, not replicated. By all appearances, she lays full graffiti pieces down (or her approximations of their hidden bounds), then layers on newer ones, climbing toward the surface. She's an archaeologist attempting to simulate the accumulation of artistic hands. Her paintings are warmer than Cyr's, partly inherent of the canvas, and partly the mottled brush technique. In some places it's frothy. She adopts sci-fi angles to emphasize the atmospheric perspective beyond her painted bridges, lots, and overpasses. Hess, like Cyr, makes a kind of beautiful ugly with man-made exteriors in the way Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville did with people.

Cyr does it in a seemingly methodical way. Transposition of a line design is what graffiti is (in its popular form)--more muscle memory than improvisation. It's pre-arranged and designed for speed. Cyr takes this idea with a grain of science in his Utz potato chip truck paintings. Three trucks, over baby blue backdrop, appear to have started identically: large package trucks with factory paint. Only one manages to maintain this state, left as a control subject, as Cyr skins two others with faux-spray paint veneers. The buildup is reminiscent of 3D modeling. It goes wire form-solid model-textured surface. My interest in his graffiti application is how he seesaws between straightforward graffiti writing on flat truck surfaces and masterfully faking it on the sculptured surfaces, those flares or bends in the metal. He fills it in instead of stroking it, but in both cases he's dutiful to the authenticity of his craft, captured within the taut black outlines of his trucks and vans.

Like the grasses sprouting through the train tracks in Hess's Eureka paintings, graffiti relies on regrowth. The progression of horizontal tracks reads like time ticking, with plants reclaiming the land that 19th century infrastructure abandoned. Temporal Surfaces presented scenes mostly undisturbed except by the inevitable--not painted over by cops or rogue neighborhood watchdogs. It's an ongoing unfolding of artistic handiwork out there, and it's ours.
- Andy Ritchie 3/29

URBAN(E) LANDSCAPES AT LASCANO GALLERY
March 2-April 9, 2006

Painting is alive and well in Great Barrington, and the proof is on Main Street in "Take to the City, Take to the Country,"

It's not nostalgia for our Industrial past that drives Jessica Hess' interest in old buildings. For her, factory buildings are like paintings themselves. Rectilinear (made up of lines, volumes, colors, shapes, stains, and scars), her buildings are surfaces loaded with history. In painting them she respects their geometric orderliness, revels in gridded windows, smokestacks, loading docks, and power lines whose taut or loopy presence divides the space in useful ways.

In "Power Plant #1," she captures the industrial glow of a working factory lit up in winter, set back dramatically across a half-frozen body of water like a cathedral of secular energy. And in "Quonset #3," under dull but beautifully painted gray skies, she divides the canvas into horizontal sections, the one-story factory building topped with a generous array of behatted vents running "coast to coast" with architectural regularity. How many shades of gray does Hess employ to connect the punishing harmony of factory life with the lugubrious clouds overhead?

Many of her "subjects" are tagged with wild-style graffiti, some appropriated from photographs of defaced buildings, and some made up on her own out of respect for the "train-bombing" subculture of the 80s. Just a few years out of RISD, where she graduated in 2003, graffiti gives this street-smart, punchy realist a chance to show off a fearless color sense that contributes convincingly to the four-square, head-on presentation of buildings we feel we know but have rarely really looked at.

--Geoffrey Young

White Walls Blog

A Conversation with Jessica Hess

Dig In Magazine Interview with Artist, Jessica Hess August 1, 2011