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Meet July featured artist: Jessica Marita
My name is Jessy Marita and I am a poet and writer, a Sorbonne graduate in Theater and Performing Arts, a former performance artist/slammer, educator and human being from planet earth. I believe that art is an interactive and essential experience and it has been wonderful to finally (and somewhat recently) begin sharing my work again, this time as a painter.
I have been interested in the visual arts my whole life and have been doing fluid art since 2018. In those early days of painting I was creating up to a dozen paintings a day, much to the surprise (and dismay–there were intricate quarantines involved) of my late, great cat, Habibi. It was exactly what I needed then and still do: a blank canvas upon which to attempt to capture the beauty and color and texture of my spirit and this magnificent and magical human experience.
Initially I was painting so prolifically in part because I had stopped writing and performing as regularly as I once did and required an outlet. I had begun to feel that words could no longer fully express something essential–language had become temporarily inadequate, or perhaps simply not the right medium for what I wanted to say.
Painting feels cathartic, liberating, playful and alchemical, as if my heart and soul are being transformed in real time into these magical and surprising land and sea-scapes, geological formations, vaginas, underwater universes, celestial spaces or the tiniest life forms as if seen beneath a microscope.
My paintings come in all sizes and are made using a variety of techniques and mediums, primarily layering colors of acrylic paint into a cup and then pouring, allowing the tilting and manipulation of the canvas, chemical reactions, emotion and desires, as well as gravity, to replace the paintbrush. Lately I have been getting more into embellishing over dried pours (texts and images, a bit like tea bag art sometimes) and even repurposing canvases as I do have a surplus of inventory and need more space to paint.
The paintings are often untitled, although I do infuse intentionality and even hidden messages into my work. In fact, the paintings have names in my mind but I veer away from telling the viewer what to see by assigning titles. Indeed, one thing I love about fluid art–and abstract art in general–is that it has a sort of Rorschach-y effect. We see what we see and we don’t all see the same things. My paintings can take the viewer into personal realms, often giving something psychedelic or dreamlike, a bit like cloud gazing. I like to watch what people are drawn to when I exhibit or sell, and when I gift someone a painting it is almost always because they have expressed that they find a particular piece compelling or beautiful.
I have taught painting and hope to begin teaching more, exhibiting and selling more, creating an online space and essentially devoting more of my life’s energy into both visual and textual expression.
I currently reside in Ashby, MA and have a few images to peep on my (under-development, work-in-progress) social media pages: https://www.instagram.com/jessica_marita_art/ and https://www.facebook.com/jessica.marita. Discovering the New Dawn Art Center and joining the MA chapter of the Women’s Caucus of Arts were two of the best things that have happened so far in my art world in 2026. Please reach out if you are interested in purchasing or exhibiting my work, a studio tour or classes, at: jessymarita22@gmail.com
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