Jessica Krause Smith is deeply fascinated by energies, rhythms, cultural zeitgeist, relationships, cycles–and how universal dualities like chaos and harmony, darkness and light, spontaneity and structure, wildness and control shape our human experience. Her work is concerned with these tensions and processes – how they influence us psychologically, are mirrored in nature, biology and present in our surroundings.

Her perspective is informed by her own richly textured personal journey including growing up in upstate New York surrounded by community and nature, spending summers by the sea in coastal Massachusetts, formative educational experiences, transformative travels, being an eldest daughter and fraternal twin in a vibrant family with a deep history, touring with and marriage to her musician husband, becoming a mother – all combined with decades of living in the zeitgeist of New York City where she has balanced her painting practice with a dynamic graphic design career in media, advertising, and fashion.

Through a philosophical lens, her art practice explores intuition, memory, reaction, and materiality–drawing from lived experiences and refracting them through a personal and aesthetic filter. Her dynamic painting process merges chance with intention, weaving together past, present, and future thought waves with meditative review, subconscious impulses and deliberate decisions. The result is a vibrant body of painterly, textural abstract works on canvas–layered with material experimentation and evocative gestures–that invites viewers into a contemplative space of personal and universal reflection, sensory engagement, and poetic resonance.