Colours That Breathe on Jessica Cannon’s Celestial Canvases

The mystic, feminine landscapes of Jessica Cannon’s (b. New York, 1979) work convey the connection between forms of life on Earth and beyond. The artist has developed her own symbolic language of intricate dots reminiscent of cells or stars, which spiral into cosmic topographies on her iridescent canvases. The resulting ethereal, spiritual paintings are akin to a portal to another world. Light is imperative to Cannon’s practice - these poetic depictions of the ocean, the sky, or female bodies extending into landscapes shimmer as the viewer moves around the work. Colours breathe and shapes undulate on her canvases, revealing the aliveness of all forms of life. Her celestial paintings are maps of consciousness that reveal the resemblance between humans and horizons, shells and constellations.

Jessica Cannon received a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from Parsons School of Design. She currently teaches Drawing and Painting at CUNY Queens College. In Fall 2017 Jessica founded Far By Wide, an ongoing series of exhibitions online and in pop-up spaces to support social and environmental justice organizations. Her recent solo exhibitions include Veils at Polina Berlin Gallery (New York, NY), The Spiral Path at Winston's (Los Angeles, CA), and Rapid Cycle at Honey Ramka (Brooklyn, NY).

What brought you into the art world? Do you have any memories from your childhood that drove you to become an artist?

I have been making art for as long as I remember, and would always get absorbed by what I was working on, even as a kid. My parents were very encouraging, and my Mom is a visual person, so she took delight in pointing things out and raising me to look closely, particularly at the natural world. We often went to the beach and would look at the horizon and the sky, which feels like a formative memory to me now. I grew up surrounded by creative and resourceful people, but I did not know any working artists, so at that time, art seemed like something that I would always do, but maybe not as a job.

That started to change during my senior year in college. While preparing to graduate with a degree in Psychology and English, I also took studio art classes at the Museum School in Boston. A few weeks before graduation, a wonderful art professor named Robert Siegelman invited our class to his open studio. At that point, I had never seen an artist's workspace, and when he opened the door, I felt a powerful wave of excitement and clarity, along with some sadness because my studies set me on a different path.

Seeing that studio was life-changing. It gave me something to hold onto in those uncertain times after college when I wasn't sure what I was doing or how I could one day have a room like my professor's studio. Over the next three years, I painted while working odd jobs, moved back to New York, and was accepted into a graduate fine arts program, which introduced me to many more examples of how artists lived and worked.

Describe your work in three words.

I’m always excited to hear how viewers experience the paintings. There is a three-word phrase that I keep coming back to lately when thinking about what I want to see in the work: colour that breathes.

Your ethereal paintings are akin to a portal to another world. Where do you draw your inspiration from?

I feel inspiration from many sources: time in open spaces, patterns and colors in the natural world, walking to my studio in Brooklyn, visiting other artists and exhibitions, and lately noticing decorative motifs in architecture. As I’m taking things in, I find that ideas and images also arise internally from personal experiences and intuitive drawings that are a regular part of my studio routine.

Can you describe your creative process and how you choose the colour palette and pigments for each work?

The paintings are based on intuitive line drawings that I do in pencil, and then refine until the composition feels right. I choose each painting’s colors to marry the lines and shapes from the drawings to something harder to pin down- a feeling that is both familiar and ineffable.

Sometimes I know early on what the colors will be, and other times I’ll explore different palettes by layering paint and pigments on scraps of linen or canvas. Over time these studies have multiplied and become a small archive with color notes that I scribble in pencil like a recipe. I’m grateful to have this collection of my painting history and find it immensely helpful to look through when I’m feeling stuck.

I was thrilled you created new paintings for the show “I look at the moon like a fellow traveler” I curated for LAMB Gallery. What is the inspiration behind this body of work?

I love the title and concept of this exhibition and the paintings grew from Luchita Hurtado's poetic and resonant idea of looking at the moon and finding a familiar companion. For me, the moon most embodies this idea when there is a sense of absence or longing elsewhere in my life. It is both a radiant force and a comforting reminder of everyone who has ever looked at the moon across time and experienced their own scale in relation.

When creating paintings for this exhibition, I thought a lot about perspective and connections between the sky and the body-ground. In Soft Tether, Green Moon, the sun and moon are gently tied together by intersecting rays overlaid on top of concentric circles. The sky shifts between blues, greens, and pink-violets, with a gold-ochre ground resting underneath. Although created for this exhibition, the finished painting feels related to other bodies of work that explore creation mythology and eternal places.

I look at the moon like a fellow traveller, Lamb Gallery, London (30 May - 20 July 2024)

What would be a dream project for you to work on?

I have so many dream projects! Lately, I’ve been thinking about ways that the paintings bridge an imagined exterior space with a more private and emotive interior space. I’d love to work collaboratively to bring the paintings to new contexts. One idea that I keep coming back to would be a public project exploring intersections between Art Deco motifs and transcendental imagery.

Any exciting plans you’re currently working on?

In addition to our show together, I’m excited to be included in Desire Lines, a group exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, Colorado, curated by Kate Mothes. I’m also working toward a group show opening in late June with Gavlak Gallery in East Hampton, New York. I recently joined their roster and am looking forward to my first solo exhibition at their Palm Beach space in 2025.