Vanessa Spollen-Jaramillo
Vanessa Spollen-Jaramillo is a Philadelphia-based painter exploring transformation, memory, and the natural cycles that shape human experience. Her project Echoes from the Shore envisions a moonlit beach where crows and ravens act as symbols of change and renewal. Through layered imagery, gesture, and color, she creates dreamlike scenes that reflect on grief, rebirth, and the spaces between endings and beginnings. Drawing from myth and the subconscious, Spollen-Jaramillo’s work connects the personal and the universal, revealing the deep ties between the inner self and the natural world.
Echoes from the Shore
Echoes from the Shore unfolds a moonlit beach where crows and ravens gather as guardians of transformation. Beneath a glowing moon and on the cusp of dawn, a solitary figure witnesses the delicate dance of endings and beginnings; a quiet meditation on life's cycles of death, rebirth, and renewal.
Vanessa Spollen-Jaramillo is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work delves into the subconscious, folk narratives, and archetypal human experiences. Rooted in themes of love, loss, death, rebirth, and the stories that shaped her upbringing, her practice navigates the space between personal memory and collective myth. Through a process of visual excavation, Spollen-Jaramillo unearths imagery that speaks to our entanglement with the natural world and the symbolic language of the inner self. Her compositions are built intuitively, using color, form, and symbolism to animate emotional landscapes. Figures- both human and mythological- emerge frequently, acting as vessels for ancestral memory and emotional resonance. Spollen-Jaramillo earned her BFA in Painting from Stockton University (2018) and her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2023). She currently teaches at Rowan University and Stockton University. She recently exhibited in a two-person show in Arlington, Massachusetts, and continues to develop a body of work that bridges personal mythology with ecological consciousness.