Jessica Krause Smith lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC with a studio in Greenpoint. She earned her Studio Art degree from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY in 1997. Her paintings have been exhibited widely, including at IFAC Arts, Walter Wickiser Gallery and Sotheby’s in NYC, are included in the permanent collection of the Tang Museum at Skidmore College and in numerous private collections across the U.S.
Jessica Krause Smith is a contemporary neo abstract expressionist painter. Her work is a visual response to her environments, experiences and emotions. Through paint application and gestural mark making, she engages with tension and harmony in her compositions in a process that uses moment, movement, memory, and materiality. Drawing on dualities like chaos and control, darkness and light, accumulation and flow, biology and technology, she translate’s inner and outer landscapes - feelings, dreams, sounds, and fleeting sensations - into a visual language of color, gesture, texture and mark.
Inspired by lived experience, including growing up close to nature, along with being obsessed with 1980s fashion magazines, she was a twin in a large family in suburban central upstate New York, spent summers on the coast of New England, and experienced life in New York City working in indie and corporate graphic design and touring with her husband’s band before having a family of her own. Krause Smith combines and channels the rhythms of both natural and urban environments along with her wide range of childhood and adult experiences and cultural inspirations found in music, media and fashion.
Her work is driven by a process that embraces both intention and accident, where spontaneous gestural marks evolve into resolved compositions and celebrate the subconscious connection between the mind, heart, and hand. By incorporating a range of materials, including acrylic, latex house paint, spray paint, oil sticks, and found elements such as glitter, torn paper, industrial plastics and objects into her paintings, which are built through layered gestures that develop over time or emerge in a single energetic session, she has developed a vocabulary of color, line, texture and shape that mix with surprise objects added in.
Through her improvisation and experimentation, each painting becomes a space for personal and universal reflection, visual and emotional resonance, and for exploring risk and vulnerability. Krause Smith’s work is an embodiment of the act of absorbing life and reacting to it in an ongoing reflection of both self and the universal human experience.