I am lucky to be an artist.

My current work is an exploration of geometry, color and space. I am interested in the power of stars, both as iconographic symbols and as mysterious elements that are part of our natural universe. Each piece is an attempt to distill the magic of something millions of miles away into a frozen artifact trapped within the four walls of my canvas.

Most of my pieces have a stark contrast between the beautiful and the foul.  I have an entire mini series of "Easy Pickings" paintings that follow along these sames lines with a bit of twist.  I enjoy precision in my work and there is a theme of accurate human anatomy that crops up peridoically in a few of my pieces.  

Jessica Niello is an oakland based painter and ceramic artist. 

The inspiration for my HumanTreeRobot Series comes from a subject, usually solitary, presented in a lean environment, surrounded by color that enshrouds and highlights. I choose a single subject to convey the idea of focusing on the one in order to better understand the collective. In the instance of a tree, we engage one, before knowing the care, or use, of many. With a human figure (or pair); who we are as individuals helps us to better understand a couple, a group, a society. A series of robots stand silently, touching on the benefits or dangers of technology.  In these representational works, subjects often convey a sense of history or melancholy.   I relate this to paths taken, or the balance of what was and what is to be.   Through my paintings, I strive to achieve a sense of discovery, where at first glance there seems to be a singular subject, but upon further inspection, one can journey deeper into the subtext, exploring a balance between art, artist and viewer.

I have had a longstanding interest in working with gestural brushstrokes creating a compressed space. The marks and forms in these paintings are layered in space, that is they move back and forth in space, and to a considerable degree they have been oriented flat to the plane.

I have recently been expanding that involvement by developing a field of volumetric space in which planes are juxtaposed, forming a gestural interaction. The orientation of these more or less geographic planes emphasize a diagonal z-axis relationship to the picture plane through their contrasting positions.

The dynamic is established through size relationships of the geometric planes as well as their varied axis, which activate the field (or volumetric space) formed on the canvas as a whole.

This establishes a pictorial space that is both defined through gestural atmospheric forms and more clearly delineated geometrically-derived forms that are activated by actual and implied diagonal forces.

My over-riding concerns are to create a pictorial space inculcating the life associated with depth and movement, color and light.

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I collect, select and recreate images in a process of layering drawing and painting. City scenes allow me to examine my own changing perspectives as well as those of American society, by focusing on the elements that bear silent witness to every public moment. These settings are shared spaces imbued by a collective history, layered with memories of lived experiences. Night views emphasize the subtle narratives of human nature within the urban landscape, and make me wonder if I’m documenting the last gasps of a falling empire or the dark before the dawn.

 Let me tell you why I'm not an axe murderer.

 I have traveled to every corner of this dark earth and it really is a terrible place:  death, disease, irritable bowel syndrome.

 Then there's the rent, the bills, the unhappy spirits floating everywhere around us.
  I chose to just run away from my problems and paint naked ladies all day. 

My art isn't about trying to heal the violence in my soul, instead it's about the cultivation and nourishment of it--because that is how I genuinely feel, or maybe this is how the universe genuinely feels, through me.  

 Either way, I am putting all of that violence out for your viewing pleasure:
 destruction and chaos, colors and shapes, form and imagination.

Plus philosophy, science, mysticism, our ordinary experience of daily life.

 It's all on the table, and because I have no allegiances to any of those things, I can fuck around all I want.

 Healing is for hippies.  Self-cultivation is for deluded artists.  
 Stop by my studio and share in my delusions.

 Namaste,

 Locust
 SF 2013