My Space: Jasmine Crisp
What makes a truly creative space?
Words and image by Timothea Moylan
Jasmine Crisp has spent the best part of 2024 painting murals all over the world – from the markets of Mexico to the sleek cityscapes of Florida. Her masterful wrangling of utter chaos never ceases to amaze. Amid a busy day of tattooing at XO Temple, completing a new mural design and enjoying a final dinner with her beautiful sharehouse before she moves, Jasmine stops time and makes space to sit with The Note on the floor of her new studio at Washdog.
What’s one of your earliest memories of making art?
In the garage at home. My mom had those kid easels with no-spill pots and the big chunky paintbrushes. She would set up paper and we would just make a mess on them – like on Art Attack. I’ve still got my little smock.
You’ve recently moved into Washdog – how does the more communal space influence your work?
The painting I’ve done of Dave [Court] is going be my first ever collab – I’m getting Hari [Koutlakis] to paint the border on it. Collaboration is rare for me! And having wall space now means I’m making bigger paintings. I started the painting of Dave on an easel in my sharehouse, which was a practical restriction.
Where do you take inspiration from?
Mostly, it’s just articulating my feelings at that current point in time. At the moment, I’m keen to make less portrait-based work and more narratives about things I’m feeling – very personal but fantasised and semi-humorous. I curate moments into little stories that speak more to the human experience but come from a private space.
Your portraits are often accompanied by beautiful written pieces. Tell us about those.
I want to do more of that – literally putting the story onto the paintings. A lot of the time, you can feel excluded from artwork if there’s no information about it. So, I want to be anti-elitist and say: this is what this painting is about. This is a real person. This is someone I adore or someone who impacts me. Maybe there’s something about them that connects with you.
You worked overseas for most of 2024. What’s one thing you’ve learned?
No matter where I go, there’ll be a community. In Portsmouth, there were hundreds of people visiting the mural the day after it was finished – all out sharing food and making an event of it. In Mexico, they don’t want a bar of the tourists [but] as soon as I would paint at a market, people were like, ‘Come to my house. Come to my party. Let’s make you dinner. You can live with us anytime. Let’s take you for a horse ride.’ Mexico’s art history is so deep – murals are part of their pride. So, when they see someone painting, they think of it as giving love to space and valuing what they have by putting energy into something they own.
What are your favourite artists to listen to while you work?
I’ve been writing down lines I like from songs. I’ve made a couple of paintings inspired by Saya Gray – she’s been one of my favourites for a couple of years. I find her very relatable and poetic. I’ve always wanted to make paintings that look like how Everything Everything sound: busy and loud and colourful but articulate and structured. And then Nils Frahm for all the sad, soft painting times.
Keep up to date with everything Jasmine Crisp is working on via @jasmine_crisp
