Jessica Taylor Bellamy is finding the grotesque beauty in impending doom. Bellamy’s best pieces capture the unfettered 21st-century anxiety of living through ever-worsening ecological disaster, and all the contradictory feelings that come with it. She frequently paints palm trees aflame and national forests decimated by wildfires, and even her urban subjects have a blurry gloss that make them look like they’re melting away or obscured by heat waves. Yet the vibrance of her polluted sunsets complicate the emotional dynamic at play—the planet is on the brink of collapse, yes, and it’s our fault that it ended up this way, but look at the colors on the horizon! There’s a sick sense of wonder to the mess that we’ve made—or, at the very least, an assurance that nature’s inherent beauty shines through our destruction, even if it’s fading.
The painter’s senior thesis show opens Friday, May 6 at the USC Roski Graduate Gallery in the Arts District. But when I visited her studio last fall, the MFA student at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design was working on at least a dozen different pieces. They’re all in various stages of gestation, ranging from a simple sketch outline of paper advertisements on a tree to a massive, complex oil painting featuring a flurry of natural imagery that’s completely finished, save for one tiny flower in the corner that the artist wants to retouch. The pieces vary dramatically in size—one canvas looks like it’s about seven feet tall and five feet wide, while others could comfortably fit in a pillowcase—but the majority of the projects lining Bellamy’s studio walls stand around four feet tall and three feet wide. The works that are closer to completion all stack numerous layers of material in unusual ways. Some pieces place real flowers atop screen-printed text on top of dizzying oil skyscapes, while others integrate papier-mâché that adds further texture and dimension.
Bellamy sees herself as a relative newcomer to the world of fine art. She grew up surrounded by creative people—her mom dabbled in raku ceramics, and her grandfather made wax casts for jewelry using dental equipment—but she’s the first in her family to make art into a primary vocation. And although artistic expression came naturally throughout her early life, as evidenced by her childhood obsession with learning musical instruments ranging from tenor saxophone to viola, Bellamy didn’t have any formal artistic training until she minored in art at USC (where she majored in political science). Her quasi-outsider perspective means that she hasn’t internalized some of the rules that restrict more experienced artists’ approaches. “Not having the painting background has just made me more curious about what I can get away with,” she tells me. “Can I screen print with oil paint? Yes, it turns out you can. I couldn’t find that anywhere online, but so far so good!”
The conceptual framework behind her art is so multifaceted that it threatens to become dizzying. She’s constantly pondering numerous tensions between sets of polarized extremes: rural and urban living, reality and fantasy, past and future, water and fire. She’s hyper-fixated on the architectural theory of Reynar Banham, particularly his seminal 1971 book Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies. And she frequently grapples with the notion of the American Dream, especially as her father’s family conceived of it when they emigrated from Cuba in the 1970s.
Somehow, Bellamy gracefully finds the natural connections between these disparate elements to create pieces that make perfect sense. Above all else, her work is a series of meditations on our relationships with the physical spaces that we occupy, which encompasses both the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles and the planet as a whole. A number of common Angeleno motifs recur throughout the project, including palm trees, freeway signs, and, most frequently, a subtler Southern Californian staple: smog. Bellamy is particularly fascinated by the way that pollution filters and warps the light from the sunset, to the point where almost every one of her pieces contains a fragment of a gorgeous hazy sky. “The light and the sky, it’s definitely what I’m seeing connecting most pieces,” Bellamy explains. “Light definitely has its own substance, if you want to think scientifically about it, but it’s fun to try to mediate it into painting.”
But the city’s role in Bellamy’s work isn’t just as subject matter. The artist also incorporates physical elements of Los Angeles’s DNA into her pieces. During the pandemic, Bellamy began collecting clippings from the Los Angeles Times to create massive stacks of material that she constantly refers to as her “archive.” It includes daily weather projections, solar and lunar charts, and countless color photos of Angelenos, all of which were eventually integrated into several distinct pieces that used the clippings as material ties to her hometown. Her archival approach seemed surprisingly familiar to me as a writer: like a journalist, she acquires an overwhelming amount of content, then condenses it and reassembles it to find new meaning. Her journalistic methodology made even more sense after she explained that she worked at KCRW for several years after college. “That whole background of getting information a bunch of different ways, being a radio person, and being someone who’s a big reader, but I don’t really like to write…this is my way to process everything,” she explains.
Bellamy also turns discarded pages of the Times into papier-mâché, and sometimes weaves the front page into her compositions. In a particularly striking piece titled “Coping Mechanism,” she presents a disturbing Times story as wrapping paper for a bouquet of flowers exchanging hands, drawing attention to how we strip objects of their meaning when we recontextualize them for another use. “You’re not really meant to read newsprint when it’s wrapping something, or when it’s used as packing materials,” she explains.
The most overt use of the Los Angeles Times is in a trio of massive paintings in which Bellamy screen prints a massive front page over the entire canvas, with numerous layers of oil painting above and below the text—titled “Present Myth Future Fantasy,” “Smog and Flashes of Wonderment (Blue Smudgy),” and “A Smugness to It (Wild Bloody Mustard),” all 2021. Bellamy carefully constructed the page to include stories across multiple decades that feature keywords that intrigue her, finding material by searching for key phrases in the Los Angeles’ Times historical archives. “I did ‘pollution,’ I did ‘super bloom’ or ‘blossom,’ because those kept coming up together,” she says. “I did ‘oil spill,’ or I might have actually put ‘sea aflame’ or ‘ocean on fire’ because of what was happening in 2021, not necessarily expecting or knowing that I’d find one that I wanted to put in from 1984.”
Even when she’s not painting, Bellamy remains fixated on the environment. She describes herself as an “optimistic nihilist,” which motivates her to travel and witness as many of Earth’s natural wonders as she can before they disappear. She’s drawn to the rapidly-shrinking coral reefs, many of which she’s explored on scuba trips that she simultaneously cherishes and feels guilty about: “oh, okay, we flew here on a plane, and we got on one of those diesel-y boats that smell really bad…should I even be here? I’m not exactly sure I should.”
To clear her head of all this important but terrifying business, she likes to spend her free time escaping into other worlds and activities (which is a common theme in her art). She roller skates at Playa del Rey, makes guava pastries with local fruit, binges The Expanse on Amazon, and seeks out as much live music as she can. And her idea of taking time off from art includes constant brainstorming about how to convert her dazzling three-minute painted animation project “Redlining Hawks” into a narrative screenplay.
The “Redlining Hawks” project is an impressive work of art as it stands. During the pandemic, Bellamy recorded conversations with her father and her aunt Daysi about living in Inglewood in the ‘70s and inadvertently uncovered a family story that she’d never heard before. They recall how Bellamy’s dad and his neighbors captured and raised baby redtail hawks in their backyards and unleashed them on open fields in the middle of Inglewood—which is hard to imagine if you’ve seen that densely-populated part of Los Angeles in the last decade. Bellamy layers recordings of the conversations over contemporary footage of the hazy areas they describe, then paints animated sketches of birds, local landmarks, and human figures over the video footage. It functions perfectly as part of her thesis project, yet it’s also easy to imagine it working equally well as the kind of narrative short or feature that could easily dominate the festival circuit. Her pitch is a strong one: “I don’t know the first thing about screenwriting, I just know what feels good…you know how Princess Bride is a grandpa reading a story?” she asks. “The framing device is that in reality, like dad is sick, grandma is really old and sick, and I’m getting worried that I’m not going to know them. Let me talk to my family members and then totally leave that space and go to the fantasy of the seventies.” It’s an exciting prospect, and it’s the kind of project where Bellamy could further solidify her artistic voice as a meditator on the bittersweet tragedy of the passage of time—especially as it takes its toll on the planet.