About the Artist

Jessica Maring is a self-taught artist, having drawn and painted from the time she could hold a pencil. After a long career in high-tech, she retired in 2002 and returned to painting full time. The first major piece she painted, “The Woodwife”, was her vision of a character which appears in Celtic mythology, and until recently, most of her work reflected her love of the art and legends of ancient peoples.

Living in Arizona, she came to love the legends of the Native Americans. She painted her interpretations of various creatures such as Coyote using acrylics, in the intense hot colors of the Southwest, and sold her work in a gallery in Sedona.

While searching online one night to learn about the history of the horse in Native American culture, she stumbled across the extraordinary images of horses and other animals painted on the walls of caves, about 17,000 years ago, near what is Lascaux, France today, and her love affair with yet another era of antiquity began, resulting in the “Ice Age Animals” collection.

On returning to California (where she was born and raised), Jessica’s style and subject matter also changed. Her current collection, “California Coastal Landscapes”, presents scenes of coastal California in oils, rendered realistically in the broader palette of California’s thousand hues of green, the subtle shades of rain and fog, and the shadows of lingering twilight. She paints from her own photos, most of which are taken near her home in the Santa Cruz mountains. Since returning to California Jessica has shown her work at various art & wine festivals, exhibitions, and Santa Cruz County’s annual Open Studios Art Tour.

“I love beauty, and to me, nothing is more beautiful than the natural world. I often wish I could convey the whole experience of a place in a painting--that I could paint the smell of the sea, the feeling of warm sun and cool breeze, the cry of a kestrel, the joy of being in the midst of beauty. But since that’s not possible, I hope my paintings evoke in viewers their own memories of joy in nature, of a sense of oneness with and wonder at the staggering beauty of our world, and an awareness of the necessity to care for and preserve our planet.”

--Jessica Maring