Skip to main content

Cool, Calm and Collected

By April 4, 2013October 30th, 2017Blog, Jessica Zoob's Latest News

I have been incredibly fortunate to be interviewed three times by the wonderfully talented journalist  Helen Chislett for the Art of England magazine.

My paintings have also been featured on the front cover three times. Over the Easter weekend I was looking through these back issues, reminiscing and wanted to shared them with you.

Cool, Calm and Collected was my first interview with Helen in 2009. I produced three major collections that year and we met in December when my works were at Studio 66 in the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour.

Helen completely gets what I do and why I paint, she describes it beautifully:

     Healing’, ‘tranquil’ and ‘joyous’ are words commonly used around Zoob’s work. It is not that they are unfailingly glad in a Pollyanna-ish way though – there are storms in evidence, metaphors for the turbulence of life. However, there is optimism too – light on the edge of a cloud or a shaft of light breaking through the darkness. Subliminally, they are all about moving to a state of lightness or place of hope. The emotion she puts into her paintings is often equalled by the emotion they elicit in other people, as her visitors’ book would testify – comments such as ‘I can breathe when I look at this’ or ‘There is space for me to dream’ are typical. From my own experience I would say that her work has the uncanny ability to hold up a mirror to one’s own emotional state – an insightful and spiritual moment of contemplation that forms a real connection between viewer and painting.

The article also includes my first collaboration with sculptor and woodsman, Karl Smith of Carved Oak – between us we created the Wishing Tree:

A mature oak that has been split lengthways and then carved by Smith with messages and motifs of love, which in turn have been painted by Zoob. The tree has now been spliced back together with steel bands, but with strategic holes carved into the bark which allow viewers glimpses of this secret and magical world. Since it was unveiled in June at Midsummer Dream, the tree has been tied with hundreds of individual threads – each one symbolising somebody’s wish – a totem of optimism.

PicMonkey Collage

The closing paragraph of the article is just perfect!

I paint for the joy of it and each painting speaks of a particular journey in my own life. There is only ever one painting in the world that tells that story and people fall in love with the paintings that connect most eloquently to them. I always say to people, if you are not completely in love with something, don’t buy it ”.

 

FACEBOOK COMMENTS