The Halcyon Sea, New Works by Jessica Snow
date. October 11 thru November 15
opening. Saturday. October 11
This is Jessica Snow’s second solo show at Pastine Projects. Over the past four years, she has immersed herself in the culture, history, and geography of Greece, spending her summers on Crete, Kefalonia, and most recently Paros. The experience has yielded work that brims with sweeping color and sensual movement, always keyed to an evocation of the natural world. The newest paintings extend that immersion further, making the Aegean Sea itself a collaborator. Dipped directly into the water, the canvases absorb the sea as material and metaphor—its salt, its currents, its timeworn force.
This past summer, after encountering Byzantine mosaics in Thessaloniki and beyond, Snow recognized how her own abrupt, patterned strokes tessellated across the canvas, echoing both the glinting surfaces of mosaic and the shimmer of sun-struck water ruffled by wind. She has come to describe this process as en plein mer—painting the sea—where ritual and method entwine: The sea participates in creation, while the artist bears witness, attuning to the water’s pulse.
Snows’s gestural language and personal iconography take root in the natural world and thread through the work— they surge with energy, pressing against their frames as if resisting containment. The resulting work reads as liquid color fields—elemental, luminous—resonant with sea and sand, tide and sunlight. In their rhythms, we sense tides and cycles, the sun-drenched beauty of the Aegean transformed into a meditation—half physical, half spiritual—on the nature of being.
Additionally, the gallery will present two bodies of work on paper: one inspired by the poetic evocations of dawn in the Odyssey, and the other a series of nocturnal landscapes shaped by life on the bay—attuned to the tides, the moon, and the rhythms of winter rain.
Artist Statement
At the break of dawn on the Aegean, I dip my painting in the water, allowing the sea to soak into the canvas. The practice is both ritual and method. I am painting ‘en plein mer’, and as I paint on the beach, the acrylic paint flows, pools, and bursts, like so many different points of light. The water, the sunlight and the sand are mediums, just as much as the canvas and acrylic. I disappear into the process, becoming a point of light, transmitting the energy of the tides, sun, and everything around me, even the birds and fishes, into my painting.
Biography
Jessica Snow, a Bay Area–based painter, professor, and curator, moves through the history of abstraction with a distinctly personal lexicon. She is a graduate of UC Davis and Mills College, with further study at the Sorbonne and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Her paintings are nourished by research into mid-century modernism—architecture, landscape design, postwar abstraction—and deepened by her study of Asian art history. The result is a vocabulary at once scholarly and exuberant, analytical and improvisational.
Snow’s career has been steady and expansive. She has had solo shows across the Bay Area, New York, Dallas, and Southern California, including the Riverside Art Museum. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Crocker Art Museum, Monterey Art Museum, and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Beyond the U.S., her paintings have traveled widely, to the Netherlands, Germany, France, Poland, Thailand, Australia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Ukraine.
Recently, she presented Badass Color, a two-person exhibition at Le Pavé d’Orsay in Paris, and participated in the Biennale Internationale d’Art Non Objectif in Pont-de-Claix, France. For Snow, color and form are never neutral but part of a long continuum of art-historical movements, which she reclaims and re-situates firmly in the contemporary moment.
work.
