Jess Mudgett arrived in Costa Rica for the first time with a hiking pack, a skateboard and enough paint to suggest he wasn’t planning on taking many days off.
He didn’t.
Most mornings started with coffee and ended in the studio, usually much later than expected. Every few hours he’d surface, disappear to the beach, maybe surf, talk to whoever happened to be around, then head straight back to work.
What started as a few blank canvases quickly took over the room.
Jess comes from a very different visual world than Santa Teresa. There’s a bit of the American West in everything he makes, cowboys, strange characters, old signs, stories that feel half remembered and half invented.
And that was probably the most interesting part of having him here. Costa Rica didn’t suddenly turn his work tropical. There were no obligatory palm trees or easy references to paradise. Instead, a completely different place slowly worked its way into an already established world. The pace changed. New people came through. There were swims, surf sessions, too much coffee and long stretches where barely anything seemed to exist outside the canvas.
By the end of the residency, most of the work had already found new homes. A few pieces stayed with us.