“Shades of Night” by Jessie Nebraska Gifford
For more than six decades, Jessie Gifford's myriad artistic styles reflected her Nebraska past, in landscapes, color choices, the ubiquity of cows represented in her work. But her creative expression has also been informed by her many, many years as a New Yorker, which gives her work a certain gritty exuberance, a uniqueness born from her surroundings, her quirky imagination, and the many challenging circumstances she wrangled with throughout her life.
Her career has encompassed a great diversity of styles and techniques. She has worked in printmaking, drawing, painting and sculpture, and her style has moved from the lyrical abstract to the figurative and iconographic. As an artist, she has always been brave: juggling motherhood and the intensive labor of creating art, managing the financial challenges of making a living as an artist, and showing unabashed fearlessness in the unearthing of childhood trauma and expressing her newfound memories in her work.
