Meet Artist Sally Jacobs

I have always understood painting through touch: the drag of a brush, the grain of pigment, the resistance of a surface, and the moment a color begins to carry its own light.

My work grows from this physical conversation with materials, but it also carries the people, animals, and places that have shaped my life.

I first learned the pleasure of painting beside my grandmother, who was also a painter. Those childhood hours gave me more than an introduction to art; they showed me how making can pass from one generation to the next. I later earned my MFA in painting, and my work has entered private collections and been shown through Prince Street Gallery in New York City.

That inheritance continued in a different form with my son, George. We made things together and traveled through imagined worlds, and he became both an art partner and a muse. Our relationship found its way into my Motherhood Series.

I spent ten years in Florence, Italy, studying painting and living among works that had survived for centuries. I often returned to the Capponi Chapel at Santa Felicita, where I would sit with Pontormo’s Deposition from the Cross. Its unexpected color, emotional movement, and luminous presence taught me that a painting can remain mysterious even after years of looking.

After returning to the United States, I studied traditional egg tempera at the Prosopon School of Iconography with Russian iconographer Vladislav Andrejev. The discipline of icon painting—its careful preparation, patient layering, and attention to light—changed the way I understood both materials and images.

Egg tempera continues to fascinate me. I work with finely ground pigments bound with egg yolk, building color gradually over a prepared ground. The surface holds every layer. It can appear earthy and granular at one distance, then luminous and unexpectedly delicate at another.

When these paintings become fine art prints, a change in scale reveals gestures, textures, and particles of pigment that may be nearly invisible in the original. The print is not simply a substitute for the painting. It offers another way of entering the image and experiencing the life within its surface.

Outside the studio, time with my Tennessee Walking Horse, Massimo, returns me to rhythm, movement, and the living landscape. These experiences enter my work quietly, alongside memories of family, Florence, and all the surfaces I have touched with a brush.

I remain deeply grateful when a painting or print finds a home. For me, that is when the private act of making opens into something shared.

I invite you to spend time with the collection and notice what reveals itself slowly—the traces of the brush, the shifting color, and the small details that become worlds of their own.