In Jessica Fields’ landscapes and still-life paintings, vibrant colors play with intricate patterns.
Painter Jessica Fields’ love of yellow started with her circa-1980s childhood home. Designed by an architect, it featured open yet angular spaces that her parents completely covered in pale ochre paint.
Although an enthusiastic fan of many colors, Fields says yellow is her favorite. “It’s a comfort color for me for sure,” she adds.
In her light-filled landscapes and still-life paintings, yellow might show up as a bowl of lemons, the stripes of a tablecloth, or the sunset over a field. Other colors fill her canvas-wrapped panels, too. There’s orange in fruit, blue in plate patterns, green in mountain ranges.
Their vibrancy comes from Fields’ process of creating an underpainting “in the complementary color of whatever I’m going to be painting,” she says. “Whenever you put them on top of each other, they vibrate. It intensifies the color.”
Playing with complementary colors stems from Fields’ love of the color wheel and her years as an art teacher in Houston. She transitioned to creating art professionally when her family moved to Greenville 10 years ago and now works from a sunny space at Oyé Studios in Greenville’s North Main neighborhood.
Playing with Contemporary Colors
She finds inspiration for her landscapes in the “wide open spaces” of the Texas corn and bean fields she grew up with, the rice farm her mother’s family owns in Louisiana, and the nearby mountains where she hikes with her husband, and their two children. She often decides what scene to paint based on how she wants to challenge herself “with color,” she says.
“With the landscapes, it’s a very selfish endeavor: I like painting. I like colors. I like the feeling of being in nature,” she says. “I think any intention I have with the viewer is just to share that experience.”
Fields’ popular still-life paintings are a product of the pandemic. She first painted “what was around my house. It was just an outlet for me at that time,” she says. “Now it’s grown into something different.”
She builds each still-life as a domestic scene, putting together ideally shaped vintage objects often sourced from Wilson Girls and Grey Street Market, intricately patterned textiles, and a living element like a grouping of fruit or a leafy plant.
“I like to have a variety of solids and patterns to play with,” she says. “It’s an opportunity for me to play with colors and patterns for the most part.”
What makes each landscape and still-life indicative that it was created by Fields’ hand are the striking stripes and the textural marks. Fields strictly uses palette knives and screen-printing squeegees to paint, which “certainly contributed to my style,” she says.
So do the paintings’ thick layers, which Fields achieves by combining oil paint with cold wax. A Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design professor introduced her to the hand-made medium in response to the abstract expressionists and early modernists she loved who “were using globs of paint,” she says.
“It gives me that thickness that I want,” she adds.
Artistic Honors for Jessica Fields
Fields had an award-filled 2023. She earned a spot in Artisphere as an Emerging Festival Artist and took home one of the festival’s four Awards of Excellence. One of her landscapes was the backdrop when Artisphere unveiled its 20th anniversary logo–“Art is 20”–in a Jan. 2 Instagram post. Her still-life painting, Otomi Oracle earned an Exhibition Committee Award during MAC’s 2023 Flat Out Under Pressure. Both organizations, Fields says, “have taken such good care of me. I’m so lucky to be here.”
To see more of Fields’ artwork, visit her website, www.fieldart.work, or her Instagram, @fieldart.
