19th, 20th & 21st Century Fine Prints
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Ecce Panis by Carol Jessen
Ecce Panis
Carol Jessen
Ecce Panis
Carol Jessen uses the technique of bokashi to gently merge light and dark, gently allowing the viewer's attention to move from dark to light, area to area, object to object. With her color woodcut "Ecce Panis" (Look at the Bread) Carol Jessen has the viewer looking into the interior of a small bakery-restaurant of that name on a rainy night in Paris.
On the sidewalk in the foreground a figure, dressed in a warm coat and hoisting an umbrella, seems to pause, a piece of paper, perhaps a map or restaurant guide in her other hand. The interior of the shop glows with warmth and the windows display their goods, an invitation that is hard to resist.
Printmaker, painter, and pastelist Carol Jessen was born and raised in Oakland, California, and has remained a Bay Area resident for the entirety of her career. Following graduation in 1972 from San Francisco State University with a BA in journalism and biology, she traveled throughout Europe, India, and the Middle East. Upon returning to California in 1976 she took art classes at the Mendocino Art Center, Mendocino, and enrolled in the Academy of Art University, San Francisco.
Her time in the Far East continued to inspire her and, after being introduced to the art of woodcut printmaking, she traveled to Kyoto, Japan in 1979 to take a 9-month course in the medium from Richard Steiner at the famed studio of Master Printmaker Toshi Yoshida. She returned once again in 1982 to enroll at the Miasa Cultural Center, taking a one-month intensive course emphasizing Japanese printmaking from Yoshida. She would continue to create color woodcuts through the early 1990s, and lectured on the medium at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (SF, 1989), Stanford University (Palo Alto, 1990/'92), and the Asian Art Museum (SF, 1990).
Beginning in the mid-1990s Jessen turned her attention to oil pastel and painting, her mediums of choice to this day. She continues to work and exhibit throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Her work is held in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio and the New York Public Library, as well as several private collections.