The Full Picture

Jessica L. Bryant draws on all her senses and knowledge of the places she paints.

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Before her first stint as an artist in residence on public lands, at Badlands National Park in South Dakota, Jessica L. Bryant imagined she would be entering into a Thoreau-like experience, isolated and utterly alone in nature for an extend­ ed period. Instead, she was greeted by a lively group of park rangers socializing on the housing area lawn. As it turned out, this was a wonderful thing. Among the group were paleontologists, astronomers, wildlife biologists and park law enforcement rangers, each with extensive knowledge of that place.

As someone who has always been curious about everything, and especially about how it all fits together and interacts, Bryant felt like she had landed in heaven. It was the perfect environment for the kind of experiential, exploratory, all-encompassing learning she loves. Not to mention, she was being immersed in nature, hiking and constantly gathering inspiration and material for her watercolor landscape paintings. She returned to the Badlands for three more residencies and a weeklong bison roundup. Over the years she has also been an artist in residence in such diverse landscapes as Rocky Mountain National Park, Joshua Tree National Park, Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness Area in Idaho and in Alaska at a national preserve and national monument.

In each place, Bryant soaks up as much knowledge as possible about the landscape and its animal inhabitants, plants, climate and human history. She absorbs information using all her senses—the temperature and feel of the air, the sounds, the smells of vegetation and the earth, the long and close views. She even relies on the physical vibrations, as when she camped beside Idaho’s Lower Salmon Falls Creek and could feel the water’s constant gentle reverberation through boulders at the river’s edge. LOWER SALMON RIVER AT FALL CREEK, a painting from that trip, was inspired also by her wonder at the deep­ scoured, fast-flowing river itself. “With rivers, there’s new water all the time and it looks different every day. It’s such a vivid, living thing to have an experience with,” she says. “And this river is close to home.”

Raised in Rosemount, Minnesota, Bryant has lived in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, since 2000 except for two years in Palo Alto, California. Her award-winning watercolor paintings convey the magnificence of the landscape in Idaho and around the West, and they reflect a life­ long love of the natural world-even though until college she had never encountered American topography any hillier than Minnesota, Kansas and Texas.

WHAT BRYANT DID experience beginning as a young child was a home environment rich with creative freedom, curiosity, music and artistic encouragement. Her father, who studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, worked building architectural models and later creating multimedia commercial signs. He brought home all kinds of materials for Bryant, whose idea of play often involved inventive creations. She became an observer by staring out the car window for hours on family trips to visit relatives. She remembers watching sunsets with her parents and calling out nuances they each noticed. “I had a trickle art education all my life-we were all nerds about color, values and design,” she says. “How lucky can you be?”

Bryant’s paternal grandmother was a painter, and her mother, with a degree in music education, taught piano. Bryant learned piano, then added French horn, mellophone and finally bagpipes, which she still plays. It was through traveling to invitational pipe band competitions in college that she got her first taste of the landscapes that would become the heart of her work. While in Estes Park, Colorado, for a competition, she rode with bandmates along Trail Ridge Road, which winds above 12,000 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park. It was her first national park experience and “pretty eye opening to drive parallel to the Continental Divide,” she says.

After taking every art course available at her high school, Bryant did a year of independent art study that allowed her to design her own curriculum and immerse herself in pastels (her medium of choice at the time). She was not a fan of watercolor, believing it to be uncontrollable and meant to look washed out. When Bryant decided to throw out what she thought were the rules and try producing saturated color in an abstracted watercolor seascape, the painting earned a major regional award that saw it hanging in a congressional district art show in Washington, D.C. But she still wasn’t taken by watercolor and vowed to do no more.

At the University of Minnesota, Bryant’s insatiable curiosity led her eventually to American studies, a field that pulls together multiple cultural, sociological and historical elements, including how humans impact the landscape and how place influences them. Following graduation, she and her now-husband moved to Coeur d’Alene for the natural beauty and outdoor activities. A few years later, her husband’s work took them to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Caring for a toddler and an infant and with friends and family far away, Bryant felt isolated and adrift until a catalog arrived in the mail advertising local art classes. The one that best fit her schedule was watercolor. Setting aside her biases, she signed up. This time, she immediately fell in love with it. She found herself enjoying the challenge and intellectual stimulation of a medium that is difficult but not completely impossible to control. For the third class, the instructor allowed the students to paint anything. Bryant showed her father her painting that was based on a photo she had taken of the Golden Gate Bridge framed by plants. “My dad said, ‘I think you could do this,”‘ she recalls. “I thought, ‘OK, now I’m going to be a watercolor artist.”‘

In 2008, Bryant and her family returned to Coeur d’Alene, where she rented a space among other artists’ studios in a former brick schoolhouse and soon began applying to artist in residence programs. Some of them, including Rocky Mountain National Park, were indeed isolated experiences. Yet, whether she was alone in a cabin with no outside communication or among interesting people, all were “absolutely wonderful,” she says. Occasionally she would paint on location, but more often she wanted to hike as far and on as many trails as possible, accumulating a sense of the larger landscape.

Even when closer to home, Bryant takes countless photographs and brings them back along with her full experience of the place. “When I’m out there, I’m looking, looking, looking,” she says. ”I’m doing what I would be doing if I were painting, even if I’m not actually painting.” Back in her studio, she can take her time at the easel producing works, which have gained her national and international recognition. Already a signature member of the American Watercolor Society, among other major watercolor organizations, in 2022 Bryant was elected a signature member of the National Watercolor Society with her painting OWYHEE SUNSET, OWYHEE CANYONLANDS WILDERNESS AREA, IDAHO. The painting’s title uses the old spelling of Hawaii in honor of a group of Hawaiian explorers who disappeared in high desert terrain of southwestern Idaho that later became a Bureau of Land Management wilderness area. “There was a subtle cold feeling with the light of sun­ set,” she says. “It was on my mind to paint that for six years.”

Knowing something of the history, and even prehistory, of a place adds depth and complexity to Bryant’s awareness of it and in turn becomes part of her art—even when viewers primarily perceive a beautiful scene. “It adds other layers. It’s not barren, pristine wilderness, humans have been exploring and living in these places for thousands of years,” she says. “Landscapes are like people: You can look at them and think you’re pegging them, but when you know a person or place for many years through different seasons, you notice and see so much more.”

contact information
www.jessicabryant.com

representation
Coeur d’Alene Galleries, Coeur d’Alene, ID, www.cdagalleries.com.

upcoming shows
156th annual International Exhibition of the American Watercolor Society, Salmagundi Club, New York, NY, www.americanwatercolorsociety.org. April 3-28.
Chasing Currents: Landscapes of North Idaho, Coeur d’Alene Galleries. May 12-June 9.

This story appeared in the April/May 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.

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