03/15/2020
Paintings by Faith Scott Jessup and Robert Jessup are on display at the Front Room Gallery until March 29th. Langley, WA. (Whidbey Island)
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Faith Scott Jessup was born in Yorkshire, England and received her B.A. in Art from University of Massachusetts. She earned her MFA in printmaking from Cornell, and has completed the Roswell Artists-in-Residence program at the RAiR Foundation in Roswell, New Mexico.
Faith has been creating beautiful and finely detailed works of realistic nature-based art; painting rocks, feathers, shells, leaves, and clouds that appear three-dimensional, jumping from the page.
"The resonance of these humble objects speaks to my attitude about art, the world, and existence. To be quiet, to listen, to touch. To pay attention."
"I work from observation, directly with a brush rather than doing preliminary sketches, and the paintings are quite rough at the beginning. I'm interested in things that are often overlooked, humble things with a quiet beauty.
Perhaps my paintings are akin to poetry because of the distillation of focus." - Faith Scott Jessup
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Robert Jessup grew up in Seattle and received his BA and BFA from the University of Washington, and MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. He has exhibited extensively since 1981.
His work can be found in many public collections across the United States; including, but not limited to, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Bayly Art Museum (University of Virgina), The Blanton Museum of Art (University of Texas), The Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art.
Robert spent 27 years teaching at the University of North Texas, before moving to Whidbey last year. His artistic style has experienced metamorphosis over the years, and can be generally be broken into three periods. Robert's figurative works were created from 1971-2004, transitional works from 2005-2010, and his abstract works from 2011-present.
"Although the beginning moves may be wonderfully and deliberately random, they all are absolutely crucial to and determinative of how everything will unfold. Although you have no idea what exactly you will end up with until you get there, the work of painting pulls you along with seductive glimmers of possibilities, visions of lovely resolutions, plateaus of transcendence. Until things break down, what you thought would work, doesn't and you are forced to reach for another move that you haven't thought of before and rethink the whole thing.
A painting doesn't paint itself It is the result of remembering and forgetting. Of planning and not planning. Of looking and looking and looking again. It is the result of work. The practice of painting is to come back to this work, over and over, without end." - Robert Jessup, on painting.
