Her dad is an artist, her mom an art director, so she was always surrounded by art and culture as a child. She was always drawing and painting as a kid - and never stopped. But she didn't commit to a career as an artist initially; when she moved to London as a young adult, she recalls the contrast between the art culture in Spain and that in London. "Spain still has a very classic view of painting - think of the influence of Velazquez - while London was more experimental and multicultural. It was in London, while I was experiencing all of these new elements and influences, that I decided to become a full-time painter."
Jessica just won an award in the September 2021 BoldBrush Instagram contest, for one of the paintings in the latest series she's been working on. Titled Saudade, each painting in this series focuses on the expression of a single eye. "Saudade" is a Portuguese word for "a deep emotional state of nostalgia and melancholy longing for something or someone you love," and Jessica shares the story behind this series of paintings and why these eyes express saudade for her.
While she was in London, where she lived for eight years, she increasingly began to have a sense of nostalgia for her homeland. Her need to reconnect with her roots grew stronger and stronger until it couldn't be ignored, and she decided to move back to her home town. That process of relocation and readjustment, of coming back after being away and responding to that sense of saudade that had filled her during her time abroad, inspired her to paint these eyes. Each painting is a portrait of the eye of someone close to her, and the title of each painting is an adjective that best describes that person. "It was a very natural outcome of the process of reconnecting with my family and home," Jessica said. "Since my family is artistic as well, the connection between my art and family life is seamless. We'll have long conversations about art together as part of our daily life, and so it was natural to find the eyes, which are the part of a face most expressive of the soul, of my family members to be the thing which best expresses that deep connection to this time and place. The painting that won the award, titled "Goodness", is the eye of my mother, and she is such a wonderful person - I know of no one who better embodies the meaning of that word."
She adds that this fulfillment of her saudade doesn't feel like a break in her experience or work done while in London, though: "It's a seamless continuation of my previous life and my past experiences are a part of my present. One of the main themes behind all of my paintings is the connection between universal human existence and my own personal existence - the idea that through art, a single individual's experiences can become universally shared. And I love that my own history contributes to my ability to tell that story."
