Jessie Stevenson: Dream Factory
Opening Saturday 12 September, 6–8pm
Saturday 12 September – Saturday 14 November
Charlotte Call
560 N. Western Ave.,
CA 90004, Los Angeles
Charlotte Call Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Jessie Stevenson, on view at the gallery's Melrose Hill location. This is the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in California.
The paintings were made following Stevenson's first visit to the state, at the invitation of the gallery. The British artist, known for reworking Romantic ideals in landscape painting, made a series of plein air sketches in Ojai, Hollywood, Venice, and San Diego before returning to her studio in Elephant & Castle, London, where the sketches formed the basis of the body of work presented here. The exhibition is accompanied by a 50-copy publication, including poetry illustrated with sketches and photography by the artist.
Stevenson's process begins in the sketchbook, with small colour studies made in situ and developed into colour analogies in water-based gouache. A trailing iridescent blue, mixed with brighter pigments, recurs across the sequence. Oils are carried onto canvas through a ground process adapted from the artist's material research: an emulsion of egg, oil, and dry titanium powder, built up in layers to replicate, at scale, the texture of the sketchbook page. The oil paintings range from tablet-sized to fifty inches tall, with pigment applied in successive semi-transparent glazes. Stevenson developed this technique during a Honorary Research Fellowship (2023–2025) at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she has since led workshops on drawing technique and brush-making, having been invited back after completing an MFA at the same institution.
In Grassy Buckeye, Cherry and Toyon (2026), hills and skies are built up in successive gestures of colour, evoking the layering of plant life in the Ojai valley. Creeping Rubber (2026) takes the freeway junctions of Los Angeles as its subject, employing a verticality and straightness that departs from the historical landscape tradition. Where Constable, Turner, and Delacroix shaped Stevenson's earlier work, in California this frame extends to the American tradition, from the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the transcendentalist visions of Agnes Pelton.
Folding Waters (2026) depicts the Black’s Beach in San Diego, setting jagged bluffs and pale shale rock against the looping curve of the sea, with a trailing painterly line recalling figures suspended in the haze. Walking, drawing, and writing become tools with which the artist holds a single moment; the composition edges toward abstraction and, in its dreamlike remove, gestures to Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. Across the series, Stevenson sets a contemporary, and often distorted, idea of beauty and desire against the ecological realities of the landscape she depicts. Poets, in particular Elizabeth Bishop, inform the titles of the paintings and the artist's first collection of poetry.
Jessie Stevenson is a London based artist and educator who was the Honorary Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art from 2023 to 2025. She has exhibited internationally and received The Richard Ford Award at the Prado Museum (2022) as well as the Bartolomeu dos Santos Graduate Award from the Slade School of Fine Art (2022). Stevenson addresses themes of escapism, exploring how memory, travel, and cultural transitions throughout history alter our interpretation of place. She uses the natural world, poetry, and historical imagery to conjure feelings of visual harmony and spatial uncertainty. Recently, she examined the California coastline and the concept of American 'Expansion,' suggesting how landscape tropes relate to human intervention and beauty within a contemporary nature-culture dynamic.
Charlotte Call Gallery opened in Los Angeles in September 2025 and has presented solo exhibitions of painters and sculptors worldwide, including the late Californian ceramicist Beatrice Wood, the London-based illustrator and sculptor Orfeo Tagiuri, Mexico City–based symbolist painter Cecilia Granara, and the eⁱKENGA series of sculptures by conceptual artist Victor Nwankwo. The program builds on Sapling, London, an exhibition space run from June 2021 through June 2023 in Mount Street Mews, Mayfair.
Press contact: Charlotte Call, +1 3237603300, charlotte@charlottecall.com
