JESSICA DAMEN

About the Artist

Dubbed the “Lewis Carroll of Baltimore” by internationally renowned artist, Grace Hartigan, Jessica Damen’s paintings speak to universal themes revealed through fairy tales, Biblical stories, contemporary and ancient Greek myths. Hartigan said of Damen’s paintings, “like William James she has a gift for psychology in her depiction of children. Her use of paint is both sensual and tough.”   Upon receiving her MFA in 2001, Hoffberger School of Painting, MICA, Damen was awarded a full resident fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, MA, by Elizabeth Turner, then Chief Curator at the Phillips Collection, Washington DC. She has received jurors’ awards from Jay Fisher, Senior Curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art, George Ciscle, Curator in Residence, MICA, and Joann Moser, Senior Curator of Graphic Arts, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, among other respected curators. Her artworks have been selected for invitational shows at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (DCCA), Wilmington DE, Maryland Art Place (MAP), Baltimore, MD, and Capitol Arts Center, Rockville MD.  Damen’s artwork was part of Emergence 2014: International Artists to Watch at Galerie Myrtis, Baltimore, MD, and the Biennial Maryland Regional Juried Exhibition, University of Maryland College. In 2017 saw her paintings included in Zenith Gallery’s nationally juried exhibition Resist. This spring 2023, Damen's featured painting, Artemis:Slayer of Methane Monsters, Protector of Life, is part of a nationally called exhibition, Breaking Ground:Art About the Earth at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Art Center, a Smithsonian Affiliate. Visions Verses Voices + Immersive Installation at The Delaplaine Art Center, Frederick MD, December 2019 featured Damen’s solo exhibition of her paintings installed in an immersive environment featuring soundscapes and readings of poems penned by four different poets. In 2018, Damen’s artworks were exhibited with the poems of Maj Ragain in Home to the Sargasso Sea: A long journey of loving collaboration presented by Kent State University School of Art, Collection and Galleries, The Wick Poetry Center with support from the Ohio Arts Council at the Downtown, Kent State Gallery. Damen’s artwork is found in private and public collections including: Kearney Co., Alexandria, VA George Floyd Social Conscience Art Movement Collection, JW Jones, Charlotte, NC Ginsberg, Feldman & Bress, Attorneys, Washington, DC GRE Insurance, Inc., New York, NY IIT Research Institute, Chicago, IL and Fairfax, VA Wick Library Corner, University of Ohio at Kent State, OH The Polinger Company, Chevy Chase, MD Rust Insurance Company, Washington, DC Peter J. Sharp Foundation, New York, NY Pat and Jeanne Turner, Baltimore, MD United States Department of State, Art in Embassies Program, 1990-1994 Sidwell Friends School, Washington DC Sunwest Communications Inc., Dallas, Texas Zuckerman, Spaeder, Goldstein, Taylor & Kolker, Vienna, VA    

Artist's Statement

We all know Earth is our only home. Nevertheless, our daily lives are mostly filled with immediate concerns as if we weren’t on the precipice of a catastrophic environmental tipping point. I have been creating a series of oil and ink brush paintings entitled “Mother We Will Not Forsake You” for some years to help me confront the awful truths of our threatened world. Sometimes I focus on the “some small part of it.”(1) I love the Chesapeake Bay and the fields around me that are developed and stripped of their diversity. Other times, I imaginatively travel further afield and envision a young girl as the mythological Greek goddess, Artemis, pointing her long wood bow at methane polluters. Artemis is a feminine archetype. She is idealized both as a protector of pregnant women and children, and a huntress destroying those who attempt to defile her or, harm those she loves. Her bow is for righteous retribution. The two-sided scroll, “Slayer of Methane Monsters – Protector of Life” contemporizes this myth. She fights to protect her Polar Bear cubs (side A), now threatened by melting Arctic ice and aims her bow at the worse US methane polluters identified within a glowing circular globe (side B). In “Sleepwalking Into Catastrophe” I image her directing her bow outward. A fireboat makes a futile attempt to contain a burning oil tanker, silhouettes of falling sleepwalkers from the melting Antarctic ice sheet and a spewing oil processing plant, all contribute to a scene that is ironically, frighteningly beautiful. Closer to home, I focus on The Chesapeake Bay and suburban development. I have been influenced by two poems “Mother of the Bay” by Dr. Michael Salcman(2) and “Death of a Field”  by Paula Meehan.(3) The Chesapeake Bay is the Mother of all bays. Once her waters held huge oyster beds that continuously cleansed it. Now the Mother of all bays is riddled with dead zones. As poet, Salcman penned… Not too many think of her now in the old Indian way—say Susquehanna slowly and what you hear is Mother of the Bay; she comes with poison today gathered from coalfields, blooming algae in silt and debris, trapping oyster and crab in nitrate and shale, drowning life in life.(4) Despite decades of supposed concerted efforts to stop agricultural and housing development runoff, the latest Chesapeake Bay 2021 environmental report card has minimally change since 1986. (5) Of course the dangers to the bay are not only from pollution. Climate change is altering water temperature and salinity thus stressing native marine species. Tragically, Tangier Island will be swallowed by accelerated rising global sea levels within a few decades and with it, its unique mariner language and way of life. Relentlessly the development around the Chesapeake continues. Fields are lost and runoff speeds pollutants to the Bay’s tributaries. The Field itself nourishes myriad life forms casually wiped out when it becomes subdivided lots. Meehan’s poem “Death of a Field”(6) enumerates how the meadow’s life is diminished and replaced with a… “…Nest of sorrow and chemical, cargo of joy The end of dandelion is the start of Flash The end of dock is the start of Pledge The end of teasel is the start of Ariel The end of primrose is the start of Brillo The end of thistle is the start of Bounce The end of sloe is the start of Oxyaction The end of herb Robert is the start of Brasso The end of eyebright is the start of Persil Who amongst us is able to number the end of grasses To number the losses of each seeding head?”(7) Now is the time we have long denied: the unbearably hot summers, monster hurricanes and blizzards, polluted and rising oceans, glacial and permafrost melts, state size forest fires, blanched coral reefs, and all too many species’ die-offs. Let’s not lose hope. By quickly installing green technology we can flourish and preserve our Earth, our Garden of Eden. Only then, we can say Mother Earth We Have Not Forsaken You. 1. quote Wendell Berry 2. Michael Salcman M.D Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems, Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2022 3.  Paula Meehan. Painting Rain, Wake Forest University Press, Winston-Salem, NC, 2009 4. Salcman, Ibid, p190  5. https://ecoreportcard.org/report-cards/chesapeake-bay/bay-health/ Moderate ecosystem health (C). The overall Chesapeake Bay scored a 50%, a five percent increase over last year’s score. 6. Meehan, Ibid p13 7. Ibid