“I put myself at the art museum, you don’t see it on the sample (upstairs at Skylight), but downstairs, there’s a female painter with her easel set up. That’s me.” Jessica Newell
Cleveland into the Ohio City building – also home to Crop Bistro & Bar, Penzeys Spices, Bonbon Pastry & Cafe and Piccadilly Artisan Yogurt – not long before Newell started her work in April. Skylight also has opened a rooftop event space, which not only offers a 10-stories-tall view of downtown Cleveland’s skyline but also currently serves as home to Newell’s initial renderings for the mural. There, one can see the creative process evolve from 16-inch-by-20-inch sketches to what would later be painted on the lobby’s 8-feet-by-16-feet panels. The mural isn’t Newell’s only recent work. When not working on it – which she often did seven days a week – Newell retreated to her gallery and studio in the Fifth Street Arcades (itself undergoing a renaissance in recent years) to compose evocative shoreline landscapes that use both light and dark tones to bring about senses of calm and unrest. “Being a creative type, you can’t put it down. You constantly want to work, and you have these things that are inside of you that you want to get out. So, it was nice to have something to come home to,” she says. “I was looking for something different from being precise. With the mural, there’s a lot of measuring and making sure the perspective is correct. So I really desired something more fluid and peaceful and that would bring me a different sense about it. I didn’t have to be so careful.” Those paintings are on display at Jessica’s Gallery as part of “Coalesce,” an exhibition 28
| Fall/winter 2014
that also features the work of Italian fine art photographer Simone Zeffiro. Newell and Zeffiro’s efforts were a featured stop along Downtown Cleveland Alliance’s Sparx City Hop in September. Newell’s path to painting professionally wasn’t a straight one. Though she exhibited an early interest in creative ventures – from watching her mom work on commissioned paintings to writing and illustrating her own books – she pursued psychology as an adult. That eventually landed her a position teaching cognitive psychology at Cleveland State University, which in turn led to her living at nearby Tower Press. Much of her workweek was consumed by research and lesson plans, but her spare time was spent painting. Surrounded by a community of like-minded artists at Tower Press, though, the tide started to turn – to the extent she ultimately decided to purse her passion. Fastforward to today, and her painting now defines her workweek. “I’m exactly where I wanted to be,” she says. In more ways than one, it seems. In the same way she invites those who view her Cleveland mural to put themselves in that painting, she put herself in one of them – literally. “I put myself at the art museum,” says a smiling Newell, referring to her depiction of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “You don’t see it on the sample (upstairs at Skylight), but downstairs, there’s a female painter with her easel set up. “That’s me.” CV