Jessica Bryant took up watercolors in an act of self-preservation. During a two-year stint in Palo Alto, California, for her husband’s career, she found herself as a stay-at-home mom with two young children and feeling increasingly isolated.
She decided to take a painting workshop. The problem? The only class time constraints allowed her to attend, was watercolor—her most despised medium when she was younger.
“I found myself in a really challenging phase of life and felt desperate for anything that felt like my own and I could escape into,” says Bryant. “Even though I didn’t like it I was going to do it anyway—out of defiance.”
St. Joe River Near Tumbledown Creek, watercolor, 14½ x 20”
It turned out to be an immediate love. “It came into my life at the right time. It was my one thing just for myself,” she says. “Watercolor kind of saved me from the abyss of self or loss of self.”
It also turned out to be the perfect medium for Bryant, who never turns down a challenge. As a person who “likes to be good at everything” she poured herself into what she found to be a profoundly intellectual and challenging medium—just the outlet she was looking for to occupy and engage her active mind.
Among Bryant’s endless topics of inquiry is why she paints what she paints and how she paints it. At first she wasn’t confident that all the depth and consideration that goes into her pieces would be conveyed through realistically portrayed landscapes or reflect the totality of her experience in relation to the place and the work. She has since come to realize that all of her interests, knowledge and experiences do intersect in her work.
Sunset Over Corbin Point, Lake Coeur d’Alene, watercolor, 10 x 16½”
“I felt it personally but I didn’t see a correlation,” she says. “What I realize now is my love of all the things and the context that I like to understand—human history, ecology, ecosystems—all of those pieces are part of my connection to place and the realization of its value to me and others.”
For instance, realistically or accurately depicting a specific place is almost a way of honoring that place and the people who know it, and a way for people who don’t to connect with it more deeply.
“If I’m going to paint an actual ridgeline, I better do it right because people who know that place will know if I don’t,” she says. “By having a high level of faithfulness to the reality of a place, it allows me to share the truth of the experience of a place in a way that other people can relate to.”
All cylinders need to be firing for Bryant to decide to paint a scene. The composition has to be compelling enough, as does her experience of being there. All of the pieces came together for St. Joe River Near Tumbledown Creek,a beloved local river. It was a magical late fall day from the get-go—from the weather to the light and the fact that she had the picturesque spot all to herself to photograph it.
Tubbs Hill, West Side Afternoon, watercolor, 19½ x 29”
“As the lighted shifted through, it hit the trees just right,” she recalls. “It created a whole different set of dramatic compositional possibilities, masses of different values and abstract patterns and interjecting bands of light.”
Bryant’s relationship to the natural world runs deep. She has completed eight residencies for the National Park Service among other similar conservation-driven posts. All of the landscapes in Chasing Currents: Landscapes of North Idaho, which opens with an artist reception on May 12 from 5 to 8 p.m., are within the Lake Coeur d’Alene watershed.
“Art can remind us that we all have a visceral attachment to these places, that they are important, that we value them and the opportunity to enjoy them or, if not, just knowing that they’re there.” —
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