Jessica Curry Nature Artist
Jessica Curry is a multi-award winning Nature Artist based in the Hunter Valley Australia. She specialises in painting realistic Flora and Fauna in Soft Pastels.
By showing the viewer the spectacular beauty that surrounds us everyday, she wants to inspire people to appreciate how important the natural environment is. She hopes this will inspire them to find ways to care for the environment and protect natural habitats for indigenous and endangered species.
Her subject matter Nature comes directly from her love of nature. As a child she grew up in the Hunter Valley along a creek where gorgeous birds and wildlife would congregate especially on dusk & dawn. She was always surrounded by art, her maternal grandmother was a beautiful landscape painter and through her, Jessica's love of nature was enriched. She also has memories of following around after my Grandfather in his garden, watering plants and pulling weeds. Jessica's love of flowers and plants grew along side her love of art, wildlife and nature.
Jessica loves to capture the light as it reflects off the subject highlighting its beauty. She uses a range of techniques combining light layers of glazing with both blending and detailed brush strokes to try to capture the spark of beauty and personality within the subject. She is a hyper-realistic artist rather than a photo-realistic artist, essentially all that means is that she adds, deletes, make changes and combines multiple reference photos to support her vision of what her art should look like.
Jessica has had chronic illnesses and chronic pain since she was 15 years old. She finds that painting helps her to escape the pain and to focus and channel those negative feelings of helplessness and uselessness into a positive creative outlet. She discovered her love of painting later in life, so she has only been painting since 2014. Due to her ongoing health issues she has been unable to attend formal art education or even local art classes so she is a self taught artist.
Jessica strives to only use the best quality Art supplies so I can ensure the longevity of each painting. She uses only art materials which are archival and lightfast to ensure that her paintings can be enjoyed for generations to come. She often get asked why she would spend so much money on expensive art supplies when cheap ones would do, wouldn't they? The truth is cheap materials are not archival, they are not lightfast, they are meant for students to experiment with different mediums at a low cost, but due to that low cost they quickly start to fade. It would break her heart if a piece of her art faded before its time, she put my heart and soul into each and every piece and she wants these pieces to last long after she is gone from this earth. So she will only buy the best quality archival, lightfast products to ensure that her paintings, if hung correctly and stored correctly the beautiful rich colours will not fade away. She makes sure to buy archival paper that is lightfast and specially designed to hold as much pastel pigment as possible for hyper-realism, its this reason after much experimentation that she now exclusively uses Clairefontaine's Pastelmat. Jessica only buys Soft Pastels and Pastel Pencils which are the highest quality and have individual blue wool scale ratings on each item, each Soft Pastel or Pastel Pencil she purchases is carefully researched before purchase to ensure she understands which brands have maximum lightfastness.
Collections:
You can find Jessica's art showcased in Private Collections Worldwide.
Exhibitions:
Members Art Show - Group Exhibition
Cessnock Regional Art Gallery, Cessnock
May 8 - May 20 - 2018
Members Art Show - Group Exhibition
Cessnock Regional Art Gallery, Cessnock
April 2 - April 5 - 2019
Nature's Beauty: See the World Through the Eyes of an Artist - Solo Exhibition
Belmont City Library, Belmont
November 22, 2019 - February 11 - 2020.
Awards:
2018 - 1st Prize - Flowers
Town of Murals Art Show, Kurri Kurri
2019 - 1st Prize - Flowers
Town of Murals Art Show, Kurri Kurri
2021 - 2nd Prize - Miniatures
Singleton Art Prize, Singleton
