Photo by Caroline Trotter
By Megan Venable

Meet Jessica Ramsey. She’s a wife, a mother of three girls and artist. Also, her father is an artist, her grandfather is artist, her mother sews and her great grandmother was a composer and pianist. 

You can say it is in her DNA to be creative. “I always wanted to be an artist,” Jessica laughs, “Math was not my way!”

After graduating from UT in ‘08 with a BFA in fine art with a concentration in drawing, she left for Nashville where she worked with faux finisher Deb Baugher who taught her mural painting from the ground up. “She taught me how to quote a job and get a job,” Jessica says. “She taught me how to not be scared to paint on walls.”

After some time, Jessica fell back in love with her high school sweetheart, Shea Ramsey, and made the move back to Knoxville. She spent time teaching yoga and painting on the side with regular work at Bennett Galleries. Jessica describes her style as “full on constant movement and play” and “obsessed with fun at the root of all work.” One of her biggest murals can be seen at Dead End BBQ in the Pond Gap Community. 

As her family continues to grow, Jessica makes sure to keep her artwork in their home and part of her daily life. “(Husband Shea) is my backbone in all of this,” she says. “He makes my canvases and my really cool vintage wood frames.” Jessica makes sure that a ton of her own art is in the home, and when she was pregnant with each of her three girls, Jessica made a large-scale painting for every child. “I want my work rooted in wild feminine energy, with lots of texture and earth tones,” she says of her pieces. “I want it to be a little scruffy, a little bohemian, a little classy and a whole lot of southern at the same time.” 

Her aspirational goals are to break out into the national scene, where she is already realizing success in that area. Jessica is scheduled to be a featured artist at both the Montgomery Bell Academy Art Show in Nashville and Round Top Fine Art Festival in Texas. “I am so excited to be a part of these shows,” she gushes. 

Lately you can find her in her store, Jessica Ramsey Fine Art and Murals, on Kingston Pike, either creating her own art or teaching others to do so. Jessica recently hosted an event through the Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital where 40 people painted their own Dolly with her encouragement. “Dolly has a piece of mine too,” she says. “She said she loved how I paint her pretty.”

Despite her reach for global recognition of her work, Knoxville is always where she hangs her hat and her heart. “This is home,” she says. “I feel like it comes out in my work.”