May 23, 2025

Artist to Watch

JO MESSER

NB: Can you tell us about your career as an artist? Where did it begin? How did it evolve to where you are now?

JM: I dropped out of real college and decided to go to the Cooper Union. When I finished my MFA and moved back to the city, I was living in my studio and working through some stuff. Around that time I was in a group show, and one of my paintings was actually hanging outside on Canal Street. Ellie Rines saw it and asked if she could come by my studio. After that I did NADA with Ellie and Era, and then my first solo show was with 56 Henry in 2020 -2021. That was kind of the beginning, and since things have happened very quickly. I was very lucky in that sense. So I love 56 Henry, and I’ve been represented by them since 2021 as well.

NB: Fantastic! And you come from a family of artists.

JM: Yes, my dad is a painter and my mom is a writer/filmmaker, so I’ve always been around art. My dad’s a phenomenal painter, much better than I am. So yes, I think maybe it’s in the genes or in the bloodline somewhere.

NB: So tell us, what is your process like? Where do you start and how do you work through a painting?

JM: I do a lot of drawings but I don’t really sketch out a plan for a painting. I like to have a lot of work going on all at once because the best thing in life is to start a painting. I usually begin a few works at the same time and they start with color: I prepare my grounds in a way that builds up lines and texture so that when I begin working there is an element of the unknown where different marks that I did not plan for will come through. This way I have something to kind of work against. Then, as I continue to work, images and things will arise from them. I have these internal narratives around each painting, so there’s usually a goal, a feeling, or a story I want to convey. I also do like to keep them sort of open-ended for the viewer so that they can kind of go in many different directions. 

I work slowly and since I have a lot going on, I’ll work on something for a while, maybe a week –  could be a month, but then I put it away. After about a month, or a couple of months, I’ll bring it out again – and then from not looking at it, something will strike me and I’ll realize what I need to pull out of it, what I want it to be saying, and how to finish it.

NB: I feel like your work is rich in art-historical references and mythologies. Can you speak about who or what has influenced you the most and how does this specifically relate to the figure/figures in your work?

JM: I’m obsessed with a lot of old painters like Delacroix. It’s been something that I’ve always been looking at and thinking about, primarily in terms of composition and technical painting skills. I look at a lot of art all the time. Particularly when I was working on a lot of still life paintings, I was drawing from Delacroix, Goya and Jean Baptiste paintings. In the composition of old master paintings, the way that they would get into a piece would be based on the composition, whether it’s through an X-shaped composition or through creating depth. I think I do a lot of that in my work, and that’s where all of the limbs and other elements come from. I’ve always been attracted to using the figure, but I also use it as a compositional mean or compositional end, so that the limbs will be sort of pointing in different directions.

I also try to bring this into my painting in a more current or contemporary way: In my last show at 56 Henry, which was called Eat Me – I had this giant painting with all of these nude women, sort of crouching and coming out of lying in oyster shells, which came from the Venus de Milo ‘coming out of the shell’ reference. But rather than depicting it in this sort of beautiful virgin way, it was more of a dirty, slutty, crouchy Bushwick way of the lace corals kind of crouching and the oysters becoming the fish. And then subtly, the sexual innuendo or very obvious sexual innuendo within the Eat Me, the oysters, and the female figure. 

NB: Do you see your figures as gendered?

JM: I guess my experience is as a female, and always subconsciously comes through my work. There are a lot of boobs and occasionally vaginas, but I don’t always view them as gendered because a lot of the time it is more about a compositional or an overall sort of narrative, and of feeling or temperature within the work. There’ll be a lot of legs, a lot of big feet which are not meant to be gendered. It’s more in service of something else visually. I’ve become obsessed with the toes and the feet from a long time ago, so those are always reappearing.

NB: What about color? Can you expand on the distinctive palette that you use?

JM: I got really interested in color during undergrad, I took a color theory class and then I took more color theory when I was in Graduate School. These classes were based on learning value and how to deal with many different colors at once, either by overlaying or placing them next to each other. This can start to create some sort of vibrancy which also affects how people have a visual response to them.

I felt I became sort of color sensitive in that way. I wish I could put 100 colors in a painting and have it make sense but I just honestly can’t. A Dana Schutz painting will have 200 colors and they all really make sense, but that’s just not how I see things – hopefully one day I will be able to. I feel that’s why in the beginning people really viewed my work as monochromatic. They did have a very limited palette within each piece, and I would tend to stay within greens or blues of similar values. Since then, I’ve been trying to expand that and include more colors together, for example some greens will go with a pink, but I would never put a yellow and a blue together. 

I work with paint by adding very thin layers of many different colors, there’s all these different ways of building through that, so let’s say if you have an orange behind a blue, then all of a sudden it will read as black. 

I think the color is also really integral to how you read a painting, especially when it’s an all over thing. If there’s magenta and quinacridone tones they make people feel like it’s a hot painting and have these sort of ‘sweaty intentions’. If it’s a dark or blue painting it reads more moody or melodramatic. 

NB: So, even though they’re very gestural, and finely layered colors, it’s still very technical. 

JM: Yes, when I was in grad school, I used to make all of my own paints, so I got very into that and figuring out how to get the colors and things that I wanted through that. I still mix my colors today, but I don’t make the paints myself anymore. But yes it’s very technical and as the painting develops, it gets thicker and that’s why I don’t use any opaque color until the end – to keep this sort of transparency throughout the work. That’s why a lot of the whites happen at the end, because when you add any sort white or mixed-white colors, then you can’t see through. Keeping that transparency open is important. 

NB: So tell us a little bit about your recent experience during your residency in France, and are there any upcoming projects you would like to share?

JM: France, well it was amazing. It was my first time doing a residency so it was very brief, but I liked it. It’s great to go out and see other things, being in a different place and all. It was the Dragon Hill residency, and it was also my first time in the south of France. Obviously, you know I’m here working in Bushwick, and I live in Bushwick, so my visual walk every day is very different from the south of France. I was also limited to not having my whole studio, so I mostly did some smaller works and works on paper – and I made  my first plein air painting in years. 

Right now I am in a group show at Canada Gallery here in New York, but otherwise I’m taking a couple months to just sort of work through some stuff and make a big new body of work.