Jessica Singerman
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Born in Bangor, Maine in 1980, Jessica Singerman lived alternatively in France and the United States during her early life. Singerman earned her BA magna cum laude with Highest Honors in 2002 from the College of William & Mary, Virginia, and her Masters of Fine Arts in 2004 from the University of Delaware while on a fellowship. Her watercolors are the subject of a book published in 2017, Little Watercolor Squares, and her award-winning paintings and drawings are exhibited and collected internationally. In previous lives, Singerman taught yoga and worked as a guide leading epic bicycle tours all over Europe, Central America, and Australia. She is obsessed with bikes, loves to ride, sometimes races, and lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Abstraction is the most intuitive way for me to explore the sensorial aspect of living. Manipulating the formal elements of color, line, shape, and composition is the way that I process these sensations and explore ideas and concepts such as the connection between space, movement, and time, as well as the landscape, maps, memory, and the body.
I begin painting with acrylic for its quick drying qualities, and primarily use hot and bright colors that will vibrate relative to subsequent layers of color that reference the landscape. Once I’m pleased with the surface of the painting in acrylic, I continue with oil paint to further build the surface and to play with color, edge, shape, and spatial relationships. I also use pigment sticks for their immediacy and tactile paint handling that feels more like
drawing. Drawing plays an important role in my practice. My small watercolor and ink drawings are an exercise in meditation and quiet concentration, and act as a foil to my more gestural paintings. In these I can quickly and succinctly explore ideas that interest me. In my finished paintings, I look for a play between awkwardness and the sublime with a sense of history to the layers of paint. I’m amazed at the dichotomy between gestural paint handling and the illusion of space which emerges sometimes as if by magic.
