Jess Hurley Scott

Born in New York in 1978, raised there and later outside of Boston, Jess Hurley Scott is a contemporary artist currently living in Massachusetts. Her dimensional paintings of multiple layered, individually painted acrylic panels play with light, illusion, and perception.  Scott plays with the intricacies of the natural world, digital technology, and the translucency of her work. The result is bold realism and a unique interpretation of landscape in paint and glass. Her scale ranges from near miniature scale vignettes to dramatic, sweeping seascapes.

Starting as a muralist as a teenager, Scott studied illustration at Syracuse University under Robert Dacey, Murray Tinkleman, Rodger DeMuth, and John Thompson. At the VPA School, frustrated by the narrowing Illustration field she found a new direction commercial design. She moved to New York City after graduation working in home product ranging in materials from textiles, to metals, wood, and glass. The experience broadened her world both in materials and digital knowledge. She had learned how to build not only composition, but how to develop the frame and weave the canvas.  This brought her to the Art Student’s League of New York. Studying with Hugo Bastidas in 2003, she started experimenting with some of that knowledge and began painting on glass and later acrylic. With Bastidas’ encouragement, she began diving into landscape and feeling out what she could do in this new medium.

After moving back to Boston, she further developed and refined her approach, designing her own routed framing and working with an industrial plastics firm, her work began to take on a dimensional quality. Now there were more than panels, they were dioramic landscapes floating on the wall, the light affecting each layer’s vibrancy. On occasion, Scott will work in canvas or panel to push ideas, experiment, and for the newness and different perspective it brings. However, her focus has been recommitted to the transparent. Her pieces have gradually grown in scale and complexity as evident in her more recent series, Cold Water, and her current series Spin Drift.

Scott lives and works in Scituate, Massachusetts with her husband and daughter.