Jessica Cvilo

Jessica paints in only four colours: red, blue, black and white.

This began during her last year of her undergrad in graphic design where she felt the need to create digital illustrations that would showcase the grief, anger and turmoil the women in her family were experiencing. The illustrations were simple figures, simple expressions, archiving pictures and excerpts from movies or books that carried something very primal, and those four colours began to represent those primal feelings.

Fast forward - after about 5 years, Jessica felt a need to revisit this concept. But she felt that digital art was too limiting and remembered herself when she was young and unafraid of art tools. Unafraid but without the appropriate space, without the appropriate tools. Deciding to pick up acrylics, markers and colour pencils again - she went off to do a three week art residency in the country she grew up in, Greece. Revisiting those roots, she remembered how to paint unafraid again, this time with the appropriate tools. She decided to go even further, and research her Albanian culture, understand what deeply rooted primal feelings exist in lineage, history, culture and how does it all connect to the women she knows today, to herself, to the place she lives in now.

Now those four colours are not JUST anger, grief and turmoil - with them, she likes to explore connection to each other and nature, connection to ourselves and to our surroundings, to our past and our present, as well as all the ways female presenting individuals deserve to have their not-so-pretty feelings take up space.