Jess Grisafi Studio

When a bird lands on a branch, it does not question the strength of the branch; it trusts in its own wings.

- Folk Proverb, shared by Berny at Paraíso Escondido

Inspired by time spent traveling through Portugal this summer, Wayfinding Series traces the idea of navigation without certainty. Unfolding a journey of looking inward, these paintings represent what surfaces in our own knowings and unknowings, guided not by surety but by instinct, memory, and the quiet intelligence of' the body itself. The works move through darkness and light, sediment and root, laughter and depth, trusting that meaning surfaces through the process of'letting go.

Many of these pieces exist in the space between weight and lightness, uncertainty and steadiness, distance and nearness, future and past. Some are about what is inherited and passed down without ever being taught. Others are about what it means to hold space without needing to fix what isn't yours to carry, about learning when to step back and let go, and when it's time to trust your wings and fly.

To hold an unknowing is to let uncertainty exist beside understanding, rather than waiting for it to settle into something resolved.

Ultimately, this body of work asks what it means to trust when the path isn't clear, and to find that the way forward was already inside you.

Giclée prints, 16” x 20” Bronze metal frame w/ glass. 11” × 14 (matted print ) or 16” × 20” (no mat print) $150 each.

In December Iceland only offered a few hours of daylight. The sun staying low all day, washing everything in gold and pale blue.

The place that held me most was Þúfa, Ólöf Nordal's grassy mound at the edge of Reykjavík's harbour. A spiral path winds up its side to a small wooden hjallur, a traditional shed for drying fish. Standing at the top, with Faxaflói stretching out and Esja resting across the water, I felt how art, land, and the simple, beauty of life can meet in one quiet gesture.

A rusted mooring chain in the stone of the Old Harbour, the white silence of Langjökull, Gullfoss pouring into its canyon, and the great rift of Þingvellir, where two continents slowly pull apart.

At night, we stood on black sand searching the sky for the aurora.

Even among glaciers and waterfalls and continent divides, I found myself kneeling, drawn to the smallest microcosmic world of a moss carpet.

These images hold what winter light revealed: stone, water, grass, and the small human marks left on a vast and patient land.

Giclée prints, 16” x 20” Bronze metal frame w/ glass. 11” × 14 (matted print ) or 16” × 20” (no mat print) $150 each.

Sometimes when I travel, I'm drawn to small moments, pausing to notice the quiet beauty most people pass by. In Miami, I found it close to the ground and just overhead: the woven leaf bases of a traveler's palm, a seed pod opened like a star on the gravel, a palmetto frond lit from within, and the weathered, stitched roots of a screw pine. Seen this closely, the ordinary unfolds into pattern, texture, and quiet wonder, inviting you to slow down and look with curiosity.

These pieces began as wood left on the side of the road, sections of trees that had been cut down and set aside. I brought them into my studio, half rounds still wrapped in their bark, each one carrying its own record of growth: rings, cracks, weathered edges, and the shift from pale outer wood to a darker heart.

I mapped a labyrinth across each face with permanent maker, line after line, until the surface filled with spirals, eddies, and narrow winding paths. Up close, the drawings read like water currents, fingerprints, or the contour lines of a map.

A labyrinth holds the way we move through choices, socially, culturally, politically, and personally. Some turns open toward clarity and progress, while others double back or seem to lead nowhere. Each one still carries us somewhere new. Drawn on wood that was once discarded, these paths become a record of patience, and of what can grow from what was left behind.

The Sonoran Desert is a place of extremes, where life grows slowly and defends itself with spines, ribs, and thick skin. In this series I translated that landscape from photographs, into wood, using a lasercutter to burn and cut the forms of the desert onto thin birch panels.

Stands of saguaro rise in dense crowds, a barrel cactus opens like a sunburst seen from above, and a rocky ridge sits beneath drifting clouds. In several pieces, a single cactus is cut free and layered on top of its engraved background, so it rises off the surface the way it rises out of the desert floor. The burned lines hold the warm browns of sun, sand, and dry stone, and the pale wood stands in for the bright desert light.

Hung together, the panels become a desert of their own, varied in size and shape, each one a close study of how plants survive and thrive in a harsh place.

Aerosol paint and laser engraving on layered birch panels

Following the decay and rebirth of Blight to Burgeon, Green to Gold marks the next turn in the cycle: coming into my own. After a season of letting go, these pieces hold a new brightness and a quieter confidence, a way of standing in the light rather than waiting for it.

I returned to a way of seeing I have always come back to, getting close to nature until its smallest details fill the frame. Tall grasses lean in the wind, reeds rise in dense, quiet rows, and pine needles burst outward like small explosions of light. Translated into engraved wood, each scene glows in amber and honey, the colors of something ripening from green into gold. Every stalk and needle became a practice in observation and appreciation, in noticing what is already abundant. Where the earlier work was about what falls away, this series is about what flourishes.

8” x 8” Layered ink, linoleum block prints on paper $50 each

In times of transition, existence and perception can sometimes feel unstable and precarious. There are often segments that change, but much remains the same. And some pieces may still fit together and overlap to create something new and beautiful. The liminal space can draw out our fears about who we are, how we show up in the world, our strengths, and vulnerabilities, as well as our successes and regrets. It is a space where we question the depths of our beliefs, practices, and identities. When creating this work, I aimed to create a feeling of divergence and connectivity. While there is adjustment and change, the core pieces are still recognizable. They just fit together in different ways.

To make these prints, I carved a set of linoleum blocks with simple, recurring marks: dashes, arcs, concentric circles, small squares, and fields of parallel lines. Each print began with a ground of blended color rolled across the paper, then the blocks were inked and printed in layers, shifted, turned, and overlapped so that no two compositions came out the same.

Bright pinks, teals, oranges, violets, and greens build up and show through one another, and the same carved shapes keep reappearing in new places and new colors. Then the printed images were drawn upon playfully with marker for enhancement.

The process itself reflects the idea of the series: the core pieces stay recognizable, but each time they come together a little differently.

Aerosol paint and laser engraving on layered birch panels

These pieces were made during a season of transition, when I was letting go of what had been decaying and no longer served me and stepping toward something new. Using a laser engraver, I burned the photographed textures of the natural world into thin wood panel: weathered bark, tangled brush, overgrowth, and the slow breakdown of what has been left behind. Each panel is mounted on a larger board, like a fragment held up for closer study.

The titles move through that change. Tremble & Decay and Neglected Blight hold the weight of endings, the rot and wear of things allowed to fall away. Desperate Burgeon and Ripe Ascent turn toward spring, toward the stubborn push of new growth and the climb into a new life. Decay and regrowth sit side by side here, because one makes room for the other.

A tribute to my mother’s place of origin, inspired by a summer visit to Italy to see my Nonna for the last time. Watercolor paintings from three locations in Italy. Posillipo, Naples & Capri.

Each painting holds a view I wanted to remember. In Posillipo, pastel houses stack along the cliffs above a harbor of small boats, the water shifting from turquoise to deep cobalt. In Capri, the Faraglioni rise out of the sea beside green, sunlit cliffs, with sailboats drifting below. In the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius sits beneath billowing clouds, watching over the rooftops, church towers, and curve of the harbor.

I painted them slowly and in careful detail, layering watercolor to capture the brightness of the Mediterranean light and the texture of stone, foliage, and terracotta.

Together they are a love letter to the coastline my family came from: the colors, the closeness of the buildings to the sea, and the sense of returning to a place that has always been part of me.

The Institution

This series of cast bronze figures was created over several years. Each ambiguous figure is intentionally designed to have a substantial core with fragile limbs that are rooted in removable bases.

This work was initially envisioned as a representation of my family. Like so many other families in our bond; but not always perceived as equal in significance. With the current political climate, what temporarily felt secure, again weighs foreboding, as fragile, unworthy, and unprotected for families like mine.

Over time, my thoughts moved toward recognition of the thousands of families being separated by the imminent changes of immigration law. Rulings that are built around fear and hate. I ache with compassion for those who are being divided and who live in uncertainty of their human right to feel safe and united as a family.

This work is a tribute to all families who love.

May your institution stay unbroken.

Hand-cut stained glass tesserae tile mosaics. Grouted on backer-board. Reclaimed wood frames.

This series of stained glass mosaics traces the edges where land meets water: the salt marsh, the open bay, the breaking surf, and the world beneath the surface. Each piece is built from hand-cut tesserae, small shards of stained glass cut one at a time and fitted together, then grouted onto backer board. Long, wavering strips of glass become sky and water, layered in sea green, turquoise, cobalt, and soft blush pink, with iridescent pieces that catch the light like sun on the water.

In Salt Marsh and Salt Marsh II, pointed shards of green rise like grasses from a band of plum and brown mud. In Breakers, a wave curls over and foams white against the sand.

In Bay, clouds drift above a dark line of trees, and Underneath sinks into layered blues and violets, like looking down through the water.

Each mosaic is set in a reclaimed screen printing frame that I painted and distressed, so the worn, weathered wood feels like something washed up on the shore, a natural boundary for each small view of the coast.

This series documents the full journey of lost wax bronze casting, from a soft wax model to a finished metal sculpture. Each piece began in wax: a horse’s head rising from a relief plaque, hand-cut letterforms, and the smooth, rounded bodies that would become the figures in The Institution. Sketches mapped out how the forms would stand together before any metal was poured.

Each wax model was fitted with a system of channels for the bronze to flow through, then dipped again and again in a ceramic slurry and coated with fine sand. Layer by layer, a hard shell built up around it. In the kiln, the wax melted and burned away, leaving a hollow mold in its exact shape, which gives the “lost wax” process its name.

The pour is the heart of the process. Bronze is heated until it glows liquid orange, then poured from a crucible into the waiting shells by a team working in protective gear, in a few intense seconds of heat and light. Once cooled, the shells are broken away with hammers and chisels to reveal the raw metal inside. The channels are cut off, and the surfaces are ground, sanded, and refined with pneumatic tools. For the figures, slender bronze arms, legs, and heads were welded onto the cast bodies, giving them their reaching, animated gestures.

Every step is physical, collaborative, and a little unpredictable. The finished bronzes carry traces of that journey: the fingerprints of the wax, the texture of the shell, and the marks of the tools that shaped them.

Some places become part of who we are. This pair of stained glass mosaics honors two landmarks that have shaped my memories: the Manayunk Bridge, arching high over the Schuylkill River, and the red and white striped Assateague Lighthouse at Chincoteague, Virginia, where I spent the summers of my childhood. One belongs to the coast of my early years, the other to the city landscape of my adult life. Set side by side, they form a diptych of home, a bridge and a beacon, each one a marker of where I have been and what has carried me.

In the lighthouse panel, the Assateague Lighthouse rises from a thick band of green, its red and white stripes bright against a sky of white, lavender, and cobalt glass. Below, a ribbon of golden sand and marsh gives way to layered blues of water, the same shoreline that appears in my Ocean Clay series. In the bridge panel, the golden arches stride across the composition, power poles marching along the top, while the river below glows in deep blues against rust-red banks and a dense edge of trees.

Each mosaic began as a careful line drawing, tracing every arch, post, and contour of the lighthouse and hills. With the drawing laid beneath a gridded sheet, I cut stained glass by hand with glass nippers, shaping hundreds of small, irregular pieces one at a time and setting them directly over the pattern.

I built each image in stages: the lighthouse and its greenery first, then the sky and water, and for the bridge, the golden arches before the sky above and the river and banks below. Once the glass was in place, the panels were grouted, knitting every piece into one surface and framing each image in a soft gray border.

The finished mosaics shimmer as the light moves across them, much like sunlight on water or on stone. They are a quiet tribute to two places that hold my history, and to the way certain landmarks become anchors we return to again and again.

Watercolor Paper, Acrylic, Watercolor, Pastel and Charcoal  19.75” x 27.5”

Ocean Collage Work gathers the language of the shoreline into soft washes and cut forms. Watercolor pools across each sheet in sea green, tidal blue, violet, and pale sand, like light moving through shallow water. Layered over and around these washes are cut shapes in oil, pastel, and acrylic: crescents that curl like breaking waves, spirals and shell forms, scattered dots that rise like bubbles, and striped, grain-like strokes that recall driftwood and seaweed.

Each piece takes its name from the movement of the sea: the reach of a Tideline, the stillness of the Shallows, the gathering force of a Swell, the quiet pulse of a Ripple, and the small, clinging life of Barnacles.

Together they read as an abstract tide chart, a playful study of rhythm, buoyancy, and the patterns the ocean leaves behind.

A companion to my Ocean Clay series, these small ceramic pods carry the same acknowledgment to the ocean and to the childhood summers I spent at Chincoteague, Virginia. Here those memories are gathered into enclosed, hollow forms that fit in the hand. Each pod is shaped like a stone, an egg, or a seed washed up on the shore, and its surface becomes a small world of sea life. Shell spirals, fish, coral, seaweed, and jellyfish curl around the curves in low relief, joined by incised lines, dotted textures, and trailing marks like tide lines in the sand.

To finish each piece, I brushed on a glaze wash, then wiped most of it away, so the color settles into every carved line and texture while the raised surfaces stay pale and stony. Over this softened ground, I painted color by hand: coral orange, sea green, turquoise, ochre, and rust, picking out the creatures and patterns like treasures half hidden in the sand. Turning in the hand, each pod reveals something new on every side, a quiet keepsake of the shoreline and the summers it holds.

Mods is a series of ceramic forms built around molds, each one a smooth, softly swelling shape: ovals, rounded rectangles, and full discs that look as though they were pressed from a single breath.

Every piece holds a quiet conversation between two marks. One is cut clean through the clay, a slot, circle, or square that opens onto empty space. Beside it sits its echo, the same shape raised from the surface and pooled with glaze, a solid answer to the void.

Positive and negative, presence and absence, rest side by side. The glazes deepen that contrast: matte charcoal and gunmetal, warm ochre and olive, and glossy, iridescent browns that flash with rust, copper, and silver where the glaze runs thin over the edges.

Simple in form and rich in surface, these pieces sit somewhere between stone, artifact, and something not yet named.

The Manayunk Bridge has long been a significant landmark for me, a great arched viaduct striding across the Schuylkill River, a view from my kitchen window.

In this series of oil paintings, I return to it again and again, looking up from below so its arches feel monumental. The same structure shifts with every canvas. Under an amber sky, it stands gray and solid. Against a green sky, its stone turns warm and rusted. Beneath violet and blue, it glows gold.

Power poles and wires trace the top of the bridge, and the river and trees show through each arch. In the later pieces, I moved in close and let the bridge dissolve into abstraction, with thick strokes of paint building its curves in layered violets, grays, and flashes of red.

Together the paintings follow one familiar place through changing light, color, and ways of seeing.

Each monoprint is one of a kind, pulled a single time from an inked plate so that no two can ever be the same.

In this series I worked into the ink itself, drawing, scratching, and wiping away to let the paper show through in bright white lines. Over grounds of deep black and warm olive gold, those lines gather into rings, spirals, crescents, and bursts that radiate outward, joined by trails of small dots. Pools of turquoise, red, and yellow float within them like cells under a microscope or planets in a night sky.

The marks feel both cosmic and organic, part orbit and part living form, each print capturing a single moment of motion that can never be repeated.

Treasures lie washed up on a forbidden shore, untouched by man. Through the depths of the water I can feel the vibrating tug of twine.  Toes curl into the mud-like sand; the round and smooth shape of a clamshell.  Water is like glass, lurking beneath are the beautiful, the scary things.  Jellyfish move close to the surface, like soldiers they march through the waves, slow, dangling, delicate, sting.

The ocean is where most of my youthful memories lie.  The images on these wall sculptures represent childhood memories of my summers spent at Chincoteague, Virginia. Colors and form move and balance within each piece and play on their relationship to one another.

Each piece begins as a soft slab of clay shaped into an irregular, rounded plaque, like a stone worn smooth by water. Onto this pale gray ground I built small forms in relief: spiraling shells, fish, seed pods, jellyfish, and curling sea creatures. I pressed them with textures of dots, crosshatching, and radiating lines, then glazed them selectively in sea glass green, pale blue, olive, cream, and black.

Fine lines trail between the forms like fishing line or twine, tying each composition together. The unglazed surface stays quiet and stony while the glazed pieces shine, so the creatures seem to surface from the clay the way memories surface from those summers by the water.

Pit-fired Ceramic Sculpture

Early on in the Industrial Revolution, the most important source of power and heat was coal. Numerous coalmines developed around the newly industrialized world. As mine shafts got deeper and deeper, trapped gasses like methane and carbon monoxide could poison workers or cause deadly explosions. So miners started to bring caged canaries down into the mines with them because the fragile birds’ nervous systems were more sensitive to the gases. When the canaries began to sway on their perches, or collapsed and died, the miners would be warned to quickly leave the tunnels.

With the many documentaries, news reports and blogs about global warming, various thoughts and images composed in my mind. The image that struck me the hardest came from the “two canaries in a coal mine” theory. Is it possible that so long ago, these small and fragile creatures tried to warn us of our direction? The bees, the polar bears, the human race? Are we all like the canaries, awaiting our fate?

The process used for this piece is a primitive low-temperature smoke firing. The ceramic work is put into a container with combustible material such as sawdust, leaves and paper. The carbonaceous atmosphere reacts and affects the clay to impart unique effects and surfaces to the ware.

These Raku tiles hold small, simple figures, drawn with the directness of a child's hand: an oval or a block for a body, single lines for arms and legs, a small mark for a head. At the center of each figure sits a spot of red, the heart. Some figures stand alone, and others lean toward one another, arms reaching, bodies tipping into each other's space. Together they explore relationships: the shapes we take with one another, how we move closer or hold back, and how we respond to the people beside us.

The Raku firing gives the work its character. The clay body turns a deep, smoky black where the fire and smoke reach it, while the glazed shapes break into fine crackle in white, pale blue, sea green, cream, and copper. Thin dark lines carry the gestures across the dark ground, simple and searching, so each tile reads like an intimate moment between two people, or within one.