About Jes Davis

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 bond with nature and the chance to study my environment through experience and presence. My work explores our relationship with nature and its everlasting 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.

Biography

A 2020 Tamarack Emerging Artist Fellow recipient, Jes Reger Davis is a watercolorist and teaching artist from Wheeling, West Virginia. A Mountain State native, Jes earned her Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies 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 has been an art instructor at the Stifel Fine Arts Center in Wheeling since 2015, and in 2019 she started her journey as an artist in residence for the Rural Arts Collaborative. Jes has exhibited her work since 2015 in numerous juried exhibits throughout West Virginia, most recently at the State Museum in Charleston for the 2021 West Virginia Juried Exhibit, and Berkeley Arts Council’s Watercolor Expressions National Juried Exhibit in Martinsburg. She has won multiple 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 in Weirton. 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.

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Other Creative Skills

Drawing