photo by Shiloh Leath Photography
A 2020 Tamarack Emerging Artist Fellow recipient, Jes Reger Davis is a watercolorist and teaching artist based in Wheeling, West Virginia. A native of the Mountain State, Jes earned her Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies concentrated in Visual Art and Literature from West Liberty University. After graduating, her creative focus shifted to painting the natural world in watercolor with loose, expressive brushstrokes. Along with her husband and dog, she travels in and around West Virginia painting all its rugged beauty. In 2018, she opened her home studio, The Painter’s Nest, where she teaches private watercolor classes. She currently teaches at East Wheeling Clayworks and Stifel Fine Arts Center; in 2019 she began her journey as an artist in residence for the Rural Arts Collaborative.
She has written and received two grants through the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture, and History and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Tamarack Foundation of the Arts to teach a series of traveling watercolor workshops in small West Virginia communities.
Jes has been exhibiting her work since 2015 in numerous juried exhibits throughout West Virginia and has won a handful of awards for plein air painting, as well as first place in watercolor in the 2018 Weirton: The City Forged by Steel exhibit at Summit Art Gallery.
She loves her hometown (and all of West Virginia), and is dedicated to building connections through her artwork with her community. Her watercolor paintings reflect what she loves and where she loves to be; the hills and hollers are her happy place, and painting gives her purpose.
From the Artist
"I am an observer. I capture the delicacies and imperfections of nature with paint and paper.
My paintings are a journal; a collection of observations, memories, and feelings that form a connection to a sense of place, most often the place I call home. Growing up in the hills and hollers of the Mountain State has afforded me a strong connection to nature and the chance to study my environment through experience and being present.
My work explores our connection to nature and its unending conversation. Each painting begins as an idea, a fleeting glimpse of nature later translated on paper with loose, unformed brushstrokes. I experiment with color, line, and form, blurring the line between documenting my observations and capturing the essence of my surroundings."