This Southern Idiom sales exhibition celebrates the work of Winston-Salem-based painter Jessica Singerman.

On view September 19 to October 13

Jessica Singerman's work will be available for purchase during the run of her exhibition.

A resident of North Carolina since 1980, Singerman lived alternatively in France and the United States during her early life. Her watercolors are the subject of a book published in 2017, Little Watercolor Squares, and her award-winning paintings and drawings are exhibited and collected internationally. Singerman lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Artist Statement

There's a line from a Mary Oliver poem that goes "If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much."

Her writing cuts to the essential about what matters and what I hope to share in my work. It feels especially poignant these days - our world feels crazy and I'm afraid to lose the lands I love so much. One of my favorite such places is Pilot Mountain, State Park. It inspires my work with its beauty as it overlooks the landscape surrounding it. This group of paintings came from the time I spent hiking there with my family - views from the trail-side and of a pastoral landscape - not wild, but full of vast energy nonetheless.

Mary Oliver's writing encapsulates something essential about the human condition and about our experience in nature. If my paintings could speak, I like to think Mary's poetry is how they would speak. Or rather, I hope that my paintings get close to the kind of transcendence of her poetry. Marks and color that transcend being paint and take the viewer to another place - a memory perhaps - and spur them to reflect on what it means to be human and of our relationship to nature. In any case, "if you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much."