Jesse A Reese

Jesse Reese graduated in 2009 from Penn State University with a degree in Art Education. He spent the next 15 years working within the public school system and running a childcare classroom. Throughout this time, Jesse was always involved in creating. It led to him starting a business in portrait photography, playing live music, doing set and prop design for local productions, as well as doing production photography. Compulsively driven, art became a near constant in Jesse’s life, he was never found without his sketchbook in hand.

In 2017, work relocated Jesse to southern Virginia, where he has been an elementary art teacher for the last 7 years. Supported by an idea that all students should see their teachers create, to witness their own struggles and successes, Jesse continues honing his skills working alongside his students. This constant state of creation led to Jesse enrolling at Savannah College of Art and Design and pursuing his MFA in Illustration. Jesse has also become a frequent artist vendor at several regional comic conventions and has exhibited his work at the Charles H. Taylor Visual Art Center’s juried Artists Who Teach exhibitions, as well as in Art&Color365’s Spring 2024 edition.

Statement

Life is story. Our story. Someone else’s story.

I often wondered what it is that drives me to create, what forms the impulse to put pencil to paper, or brush to canvas. As humans, we possess an almost genetic predisposition to make sense of our world through the form of storytelling. Whether those stories are to understand a natural or societal event, or a way to show something about ourselves and our experiences, it’s about the narrative. We’ve carved them into our temples, into inaccessible rock faces, painted them on our ceramics, and shown them in countless portraits. The impulse to tell tales is part of what makes us human.

I’ve learned that emotion is the catalyst to a great story. Emotion invites you to gawk at a beautiful sunset, to be apprehensive about the dark house on the corner, to cry with the grieving woman. Emotion invites empathy, invites the viewer to participate in the world of the painting, and not just to simply gaze from the corner as an uninvolved spectator. With each piece I create, I try to embody within it an overarching emotion. If I can achieve this, if I can make the viewer a participant. I can provide to them a doorway into the world of the painting and let them experience the story within.