Jessica Zoob

Jessica Zoob trained at Central School of Arts and Nottingham Trent University. She now works exclusively as a painter. Jessica creates evocative landscapes inspired by the rural and urban environment - untamed nature, craggy rocks and bleak moors, or crumbling plaster walls that reveal the bones of a building and bear its human history in marks and faded paint. Many of her paintings are created by a process of building up and scraping back layers of paint - oils and acrylics. Oil paint to give colours solidity, lustre and depth and acrylic colour for its iridescence and metallic qualities, and its magical capacity to change or enhance overlying colours depending on the play of light on the picture, or the position of the viewer. She combines these with gels textured with glass, cement, sand or crushed garnet and gesso to build the painting’s underlying structure. Some works may also be embellished with crystal jewels, beads, pearls, metal disks or tiny shells.

"The interplay between man and nature often finds its way into my work. I do not usually intend the paintings to be figurative but they are often completed and given meaning by the viewer’s imagination. I may be inspired by a storm, a mountain, or a love affair – or possibly all three.

"I have recently been exploring the idea of the Dream Painting, recalling the sensation of watching the sky with the mind free to create images in the cloud patterns. I tend to look for hope and redemption by celebrating beauty in its various forms, be it in urban decay, a Hebridean storm, or a butterfly’s wing."