S
ome creators are fortunate enough to be able to pinpoint the moment when they realized they were an artist. “It was as if I had been assigned my identity in the fifth grade,” says painter Jessica Fields; it was a title that she affixed to her breast pocket and grew into over time.
Fields was encouraged to embrace creativity by her parents, which led her
to pursing a degree at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Along with exposing the Texan to more snow than she bargained for, the art school helped her find her chosen medium, oil on canvas. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts and later a Masters, however; it wasn’t until she made the move from Houston to Greenville that Fields began to paint in earnest. A challenge on Instagram to create 100 paintings prompted her return to the canvas, which is fairly common amongst young artists who seek to not only create, but also make a living from those creations.
Say what you will about social media, but it has played a large part in getting artists and the creatively curious to produce in a way that few things have. “What the one hundred paintings challenge did for me was to help me establish a routine, which was what I needed more than anything else,” says Fields. It also helped her find and sharpen her skill with her chosen tool, the palette knife.
“The truth is that I paint with a palette knife out of laziness. I hate cleaning brushes,” Fields says. Her impasto style may have been born from laziness, but painting with a palette knife— a blunt, flexible, steel tool— makes her work easily recognizable. The thickly layered paint adds an expressiveness to what Fields calls her “flat and stripe-y” landscapes. Knife marks create movement, drawing your eye from one end of the canvas to some small detail on its horizon.
“Working small has definitely helped me to be more efficient about how and where I apply color to the canvas. There’s very little room for error,” –Jessica Fields
Fields likes a five-by-seven inch canvas, the surface of each is slightly larger than the palette knife she uses to apply brightly pigmented paint, creating vast blue skies and sun-baked landscapes. These small works invoke a big sky feeling that belies their size. “Working small has definitely helped me to be more efficient about how and where I apply color to the canvas. There’s very little room for error,” Fields says.
Creating one hundred paintings at a time for Instagram had an additional benefit: a portfolio that Fields used to introduce her work to the Greenville market. “I didn’t know anything about the arts community when I moved here, and I’m glad I didn’t because I would have been intimidated,” she says.
Barb Blair of Knack Studios hosted Fields first show. Teresa Roche saw her work there and the meeting eventually led to Fields being represented by Roche’s gallery, Art & Light. Since joining Art & Light, Fields has focused on creating larger paintings and is dabbling in portraiture, which she finds intimidating. “For right now, I’m grateful for the space I have to create and I really enjoy what I’m doing.”
Her richly textured renderings of Texan fields and plains, and the blue ridges that shape the landscape of the Carolinas, complement the cadre of work represented at Art & Light. “The way she uses the palette knife to spread and layer is so refreshing,” says Roche.
“Her impeccable compositions drew me in and the familiarity of the landscape told me I had been to each one. Jessica’s work is a collision of place and transports the viewer.”
by Tasha L. Harrison / photography by Latoya Dixon Smith
