on being an artist
Jess Engle is an American painter based in Austin, Texas. Her life and work share the same center: a devotion to beauty.
An international upbringing combined with contemplative practice informs her aesthetic sensibility.
There is an effortless meeting of light and dark, raw and refined, solidity and weightlessness, that gives each piece a life force of its own.
The most important medium she works with is time, taking a gentle approach to the creative process by allowing form, color, and meaning to emerge.
Jess hopes the sense of presence she brings to the process comes through in the work itself.
Q&A
You've lived in eight countries. How does that show up in your work?
I spent my formative years living in Pakistan, Germany, Ethiopia, Cyprus, Malawi, South Africa, and Togo. From an early age I developed a fascination with the particular beauty of each culture and an awareness of an invisible essence that ran through all.
Later, with the support of contemplative practice, I came to recognize that essence as beauty. This is the thread that runs through all of my work.
Your work moves between landscape, florals, and abstraction. How do you think about that range?
Although I work across genres, all of my paintings come from the same place. A place of collective memory. The subject changes, but the question doesn't. I'm always painting something at the edge of recognition — a form that’s in the process of emerging, held just long enough to feel but not long enough to pin down. Whether that's a flower, a horizon or something with no name at all, the experience I'm trying to elicit is the same.
You also practice Japanese sumi-e ink painting. What's the relationship between that and the oil work?
Sumi-e teaches you about the elegance and power of a single perfect stroke. That economy and confidence that less is more runs through everything I do. In sumi-e you can't hesitate and you can't go back. That discipline shows up in the oil paintings in the final marks, the instinctive brushwork that comes after all the slow atmospheric building. The patience is Western. The gesture is Eastern. The painting is the conversation between them.
C.V.
2006 BFA, Savannah College of Art and Design
2009 MFA, University of Texas at Austin
SHOWS
New Texas Talent, Craighead Green Gallery, July 2024
FEATURED IN
Wall Street Journal, ELLE Decoration
PARTNERSHIPS
Interior Designers
Amber Interiors, Ashley Whited Designer, Brenna B Interiors, Corvus Design House, Kim Lewis Designs, StyleMe by Guided Home Design, Tahoe Modern, The Interior Collective
Art Consultants
Four Hands Art Studio, Kalisher, Local Language, Peter Millard & Partners, Soho Myriad
Select Retailers
Anthropology, Burke Decor, Crate + Barrel, Four Hands, High Fashion Home, Lulu Neiman Marcus, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Shoppe Amber Interiors, West Elm
TV & Film
Property Brothers Canada, Selling Sunset, Somebody I Used to Know
