About Jamie

BIO

Jamie Orr is an abstract artist based in Rockaway Beach, New York. She holds a background in Psychology and Visual Arts, with a master’s degree in Applied Behavior Analysis, and spent over a decade working as a behavior analyst specializing in autism. In 2021, she shifted fully into her studio practice. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Northeast, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and South Carolina, and is held in private collections across the United States, Canada, England, Mexico, Germany, and Dubai.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work explores landscape through material, surface, and lived experience rather than literal representation. I build each painting slowly through layered processes that mirror natural accumulation, erosion, and weathering. The surfaces are shaped over time, allowing gravity, texture, and restraint to guide the work as much as intention.

The environments that inform my practice are places that have left a lasting imprint. The shoreline of Rockaway Beach, coastal marshlands, coastal California, and desert landscapes such as Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley influence both palette and process. Rather than depicting these locations directly, the paintings reflect the experience of being within a landscape, where stillness, movement, and subtle shifts unfold gradually.

Layering is central to my approach. Translucent washes alternate with textured passages, allowing earlier decisions to remain visible beneath the surface. Materials are applied, obscured, and revealed, creating depth and quiet tension. Light is treated as something that emerges from within the painting rather than resting on top, producing moments of subtle luminosity that shift with viewing conditions.

Through this process, landscape becomes a space of memory, presence, and material history. The work is less about describing a place and more about how place is absorbed over time and carried forward, translated through surface rather than image.