Trained at Glasgow School of Art (1993-96) gaining a first class degree and the prize for best degree show. 

Solo Presentation: The London Art Fair - Project Space (2020)

Group Exhibitions: Kittoe Contemporary Christmas Exhibition (2018); The Affordable Art Fair, Battersea and Hampstead (2019); The Art & Antique Fair Olympia (2019); Kittoe Contemporary Christmas Exhibition (2019); The Affordable Art Fair, Battersea (2020)

Collections:  Works owned by  private collectors in the U.K. and internationally.

Prizes: Selected for the Mostyn Agored Exhibition 2019. Selected for the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition 2020.

Jess Quinn creates surreal worlds, filled with colour and pattern, that mix the magical and the mundane. She weaves together memories and real events with fictional characters and places. These imagined worlds, inhabited by women and wild animals, offer an escape, the possibility of a new existence. However, there is always suggestion of darkness, a looming threat. Her characters look out at us with an unflinching  gaze that we are compelled to return. They are represented as protectors and builders, the wild animals as guardians representing their strength.

Jess’s work reflects her struggle to survive and create in a restrictive and sometimes oppressive domestic space; the constant battle to reconcile child rearing with making Art. Primarily working in acrylic and gouache, she explores ideas around the experience of the female Artist and female representation in art. She embraces the history of painting, referencing her many inspirations whilst presenting her unique interpretation of the world. Influences range from Gauguin and Matisse’s colour and landscapes to the surreal work of  Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. 

Jess Quinn was born in Bristol (b. 1968) to a British father and American mother giving her dual nationality and an international childhood experience that is an ongoing influence. 

Childhood summers were split between the beautiful hills of Snowdonia and the vast flat farmlands of Indiana; from ice cold mountain rivers to the baking hot sands of lake Michigan and the city of Chicago. 

Jess trained at Glasgow School of Art (1993-96) gaining a first class degree and the prize for best degree show. She went on to have three children and developed an online business selling soft sculpture Art dolls internationally. This in turn led to several years working in stop frame animation as a model maker specialising in textiles. Jess painted as and when she could throughout these years but has focused on painting with renewed vigour since retraining as an art teacher in 2016.

"I am not afraid to use colour and pattern and often employ an abundance of both. We tend to associate colour with a childlike lack of sophistication especially in Western culture where we are encouraged to employ restraint in order to show maturity and sophistication. The suggestion that children and less advanced cultures indulge in frivolous colour and pattern was made by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1810 and according to Ingrid Fetell Lee's brilliant book 'Joyful', this attitude and the attending shame or fear of looking foolish from an over indulgence in colour permeates to this day, but I have no interest in a muted world, however sophisticated it thinks it is. I am also happy to embrace the naive in my work, inspired by folk and outsider art as well as the art of children to regain an insight that is often eroded as we enter the adult world."