TX Studio: Faith Scott Jessup and the Real Magic of Close Looking

Nancy Zastudil·
Dallas/Ft WorthTexas StudioVisual Art
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“The devil is in the details,” or so the saying goes. But for Faith Scott Jessup, details are one way to hold onto hope.

Jessup lives in Denton where, approximately one year ago, she and her husband, Robert, settled upon their return to Texas after living in the Pacific Northwest for several years. Behind their house is one large building that they’ve divided into his and hers studios. When we spoke on the phone, she had just completed a painting and was working on another.

“People will often talk about artists who have influenced them,” says Jessup. “For me, the natural world is my inspiration really more than anything.”

That inspiration reveals itself through her skyscapes, horizon views, and nature studies, all of which she paints with a subdued palette of grays and blues. But Jessup’s solo exhibition last spring at Craighead Green Gallery in Dallas showed that, over the last few years, the artist has become more enamored with color.

The gallery exhibition included some of Jessup’s recent paintings of fabric printed with bright, stylized floral imagery in relation to more naturalistic elements such as twigs, branches, features, flowers, and leaves, all set against an open, airy expanse. Soon she began to use the fabric as stand-ins for different parts of the landscape, such as in Summer Garden (2022) and Jungle (2022) wherein the fabric acts as a landmass.

The scarf that informs the pale green and rich crimson patterned fabric in Autumn Curtain (2022) belonged to Jessup’s mother, who passed away over a decade ago—the painting is in honor of her. In other paintings, Jessup incorporates bits of scrap cloth or sewing remnants she has on hand, fabric she seeks out, or even gifts she has received, such as the tasseled piece in Birthday Girl (2023).

Flora (2023), with its depiction of a shapely, vertically oriented fabric bundle almost indecipherably separate from the surrounding whirlwind of pink and yellow green-stemmed flowers, hints at the figurative aspects of Jessup’s newest works—a series of goddesses from different cultures and times, female forms that she coaxes into existence by creating folds and shapes within the fabric. The blue and green patterned fabric in Reina (2024) more overtly implies a figure by nature of its dress-like hourglass shape and a sprig of white flowers hovering where a necklace might be.

Often Jessup’s recontextualized painted subjects are seen floating, almost drifting across the canvas, implausibly weightless and surprisingly optimistic. “I love the idea of things defying gravity or of creating a world where anything can happen if things can exist side by side,” she says. “The idea that things can be either floating or falling. I’m a magical realist, I suppose.”

Jessup received her MFA in printmaking from Cornell University, working primarily in black and white. She taught herself to paint by setting up still lifes with focused lighting. From there, her interest and inspiration grew exponentially. So much so, she says, “I can paint for eight hours a day; I have to tear myself away and never tire of it. I have infinite patience.”

Her patience has served her well. For example, Jessup worked for approximately eight months to complete a series of paintings called 100 Stones, which was exhibited at the University of North Texas Art Galleries in 2016. “The stones, either floating or falling, have a narrative quality—but it’s a little story, not a big one. It’s a small moment that really gets my imagination going. I think of these paintings almost like portraits.” Now she says, she knows the stones so well, she can almost paint them from memory, even if she now needs a little assistance. “As I’ve gotten older, my glasses are getting stronger and my brushes get smaller,” she laughs.

Jessup tells me that she’s not interested in realism for its own sake, but more so when it’s in service to something else, something more evocative. And therein lies the hope, the real magic, of sustained observation.

—NANCY ZASTUDIL

Nancy Zastudil

Nancy Zastudil is an editor and curator working toward equitable representation in and access to the arts.