One of the best places to see Jessey's art is at her home. About 5 years ago, in a fit of depression, Jessey started painting the walls in her house. We're not talking your normal sea foam green walls with creamy white trim here. We're talking floor to ceiling murals - HUGE! These are geometric landscapes that she calls The Grandscape Murals - on which each element was painstakingly measured, taped and painted to form a panorama which starts on the stairwell wall and wraps around the entire living room/dining room all the way back to where it started.
Needless to say, this project took months to complete, and during production time, Jessey totally disappeared from her usual social circle and stopped answering her phone. Friends started to wonder if she had, at long last, taken that trip she'd been planning to the Bermuda triangle. But when Jessey finally emerged from seclusion, she had a perky new attitude and an unusual and very interesting house. The picture on the home page is Jessey standing in her living room in front of the mountain wall. Below are more pictures of the house. It's difficult to photgraph some of the walls because the house is of modest size, and there isn't enough room to take them, so only the big walls are included here. But the photos below are accompanied by Jessey's own description of her "housework." Check it out! |
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THE GRANDSCAPES MURALS
by Jessey Ina-Lee
The murals in my house are a geometric representation of light throughout the day. Each panel uses hard edges and flat colors to depict natural elements. This way of viewing nature takes the elements that make up a landscape, isolates each one, reduces it to the essential components – color, shape, size - and then places them all back together again, resulting in a representation of nature in its simplest form, yet complex in interpretation.
The story of light begins on the stairwell where the sun sits large upon the horizon, radiating softly at the end of the day. A warm glow fills the sky and darkness begins to creep over the land. The gold stripe represents the sunlight, seen only on the edge of the next mural since the sun has moved to a landscape on the other side of the world. Its light is still visible as it reflects in a full moon rising above the horizon.
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As the mural turns the corner into the dining area, the moon is no longer visible and this mural is the night sky illuminated with starlight. The various colored stripes along the top of the sliding doors around and into the archs represent light in its many different colors as it transitions between night and day. The gold stripe – the sun – which has been outside the landscape, suddenly falls to the earth in a broadening beam of light, and it is dawn.
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Full daylight is represented in the next section of the mural, as the golden sun beam rises into the sky and lights the world. It continues around into the entry area where it suddenly disappears – as if behind a cloud – and the colors darken without the presence of sunlight. As the mural concludes, the sun again makes an appearance, but this time it pops out in SUNflowers, representing the presence of sunlight in everything that grows.
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We hope you'll take a few minutes to browse the rest of the site! Click on the links at the top or bottom of this page to see more great stuff from Jessey Ina-Lee and friends. Have fun!
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Please email jess@womonswork.com for more information.
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