Represented Artist

Jessie Leasure

Oil

Biography

Jessie Leasure has been creatively engaged since childhood. To hone her craft, she received her Bachelor’s degree from New College of Florida and her MFA from Jacksonville University in 2021. Working in an expressive, loose-realistic style, Leasure primarily uses acrylic paint and drawing materials to convey emotional content drawn from personal experience. To this end, she employs the human figure’s incredible capacity for expression, especially through body language. She balances specificity against ambiguity because nuance conveys more than absolutes. Leasure has received numerous grants and awards including the Jane Vee Memorial Scholarship and the Women Contemporary Artist’s Scholarship, and she was a recipient of the exclusive FAAE Star: State Teacher/Artist Residency in 2022. She has exhibited in shows and galleries and is featured in private collections throughout the state of Florida. Currently, she maintains a Florida-based studio and teaches art and animation full-time.

Artist Statement

In the powerful Un-censorship series, Leasure explores a topic that is simultaneously deeply personal and universal: the practice of self-censorship. Societal expectations dictate what is acceptable to reveal. Struggle is often considered taboo, a weakness, or something to conceal. As a result, most people have experienced the compulsion to censor their true thoughts or feelings. If taken too far, this practice can become destructive, resulting in mental illness or suicidal thoughts or tendencies. In this series, Leasure attempts to visualize self-censorship, revealing both the detrimental effects of and how it feels to excessively repress emotional realities. She depicts the human figure in emotionally evocative poses, partially obscured using shadow, silhouette, or even the figure’s own extremities (for example, hands or arms). Combined with highly saturated color and expressive contrast, this concealment implies that something critical is hidden from view. Through this visual dialogue, Leasure hopes to shed some light (both metaphorically and literally) on a shared human experience. A particular piece in the Un-censorship series sparked this exploration. Leasure was pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree while working full-time as a teacher. Then the Covid-19 pandemic erupted onto the world stage at the start of her final, thesis-writing year. The artist recalls: “I was sitting in my room thinking about the weight of everything and feeling overwhelmed when I remembered my thesis—I had decided to channel any stress into raw, unfiltered artistic expression. At that moment, I realized I had positioned myself in an unusual way, with my fingers threaded and my face pressed into them. Immediately, I flew into action. After grabbing my tripod and adjusting the lighting to be more artful, I repositioned myself in that same pose. The photograph I painted Crease from was the first one I took with the timer setting on my phone, composition and all. From there, I continuously threw the struggle I experienced that year at a canvas. The images you see in the Un-censorship series are the result, and I think they represent what many of us went through during that time.”