Jessica Campell recently wrote, “I absolutely hate that Picasso characterized women as suffering machines. I also often feel like one.” This statement offers profound context for Campbell’s recent forays into portraiture of women within her creative practice, which spans from comics to fibers, painting, and drawing. Part of an ongoing homage to women past and present, Campbell’s series of portraits mix and match features, manifesting subjects that are as idiosyncratic and they are expressive.

Anadolia is a varied edition screenprint, with 25 unique combinations of recurring facial features and characteristics. From one print to the next, hair, eyes, nose, lips, neck, and garment are uniquely combined and anchored by colorful, flat abstract shapes. A literary sensibility stages itself here, with the paper tightly framing each subject as would a single panel on the page of a comic. But each woman is uncontained, her “self” expressed through hair drawn in abundant bold lines, succulent lip forms, or wide eyes wrapped in thick lashes. Clothing is checkered, patterned, or adorned with flowers.

Picasso claimed to capture all aspects of a sitter by showing both the front and sides of a face at once. But today, Cubist distortions can feel grotesque or diminutive, revealing a tension between artist and subject. With Campbell’s women, the psychology is different. The artist has taken semiotic cues from the past, but moved beyond its influence–- instead evoking in her portraits self-expression, empathy, and radical acceptance.

This series began from a collage, with the artist working in cut paper painted in flat colors to create an abstract background of bold, simple shapes. With this collage as the starting point for each print, the artist then rendered additional layers using ink, quill pens, brushes, and frosted mylar. The drawn layers register loosely over the initial collage to create a sense of movement and energy.

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