March 27, 2025
Jayna Mikolaitis is one of 12 artists selected as a Gallery 263 2024–2025 Small Works Project artist. This project presents artwork in flat files at the gallery and on our website. Visit Mikolaitis’s Small Works Project page →
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I am a New-England girl through and through. I grew up in Glastonbury, Connecticut and moved to Boston in 2018 to study painting and graphic design at Boston University. I stayed in the city post-grad to work at Praise Shadows Art Gallery where I support contemporary artists with art fair presentations, print launches, and monthly exhibitions.
I’ve always been a maker and storyteller. My work tends to center narratives that intertwine people and nature. Ecology, mythology, food policy and nutrition, cookbooks, and the history of textiles have been key interests of mine lately. Naturally, kitchens and gardens reappear in my work since they are spaces where food, nature, and human intervention collide.
What kind of art do you make?
While my body of work is pretty interdisciplinary, my first and foremost love has always been paint. I use oil paint, gouache, and watercolors to make inhabited scenes of loopy figures, domestic interiors, and plants. My paintings tend to be a bit witty, sometimes surreal. I love creating absurd worlds that present nature in both manicured and untamed forms.
Sometimes my ideas don’t manifest as paintings though. I’ve really enjoyed infusing my image and object-based work in my training as a designer and typographer. This looks like using air dry clay, candles and wax, image transfers, or fibers in my design practice. I also have a strong affinity for weaving. Weaving has always felt like the bridge between my painting and graphic design worlds. The warp and weft (the vertical and horizontal threads on a loom) feel reminiscent of the grids in my InDesign files, whereas the color vibrations and tangible materials feel akin to my painting practice.
What concepts does your art explore?
My work definitely comes from a place of joy and a constant state of awe for the world. The figures in my work are bubbly and light-hearted, but they’re also usually forced into these uncomfortable positions. My figures often bend and contort to the literal frame or to an artificial framing device within the composition. In other pieces, there is a sense of yearning from these figures. They mimic or mock their environment in an attempt to be closer with it: for instance, a figure sits in a bird bath with a beak strung around their head, trying to play with the birds. I love creating this juxtaposition of lightness and compression through humor.
I think painting is my tool for introspection and a way to process the people, places, and things around me. Queerness is inherently part of my work (and I like to joke that my paintings knew I was lesbian before I did). There is something so bright and so beautiful and so expansive about being a lesbian. At the same time, there’s a lot of weight to that label. There’s a long history of societal shame, fear, and estrangement that exists in this community—a community that, at its core, represents unconditional love and care, compassion, and humility. I feel all of these things simultaneously and I guess my paintings are a way of reckoning with that.
Can you tell us about the work you have on view in your flat file drawer at the gallery?
The works in my flat files are from a really pivotal and tender time in my practice. These works represent the early developments of my own visual language.Before them, I was still painting pretty true to life. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way I used to paint, but it definitely started to feel like a default setting. Making these explosions of color and explorations of the figure felt so freeing. There’s so much pleasure and play in these pieces and I’m so honored to share them with folks!
Where do you make your work?
I make all of my work at home. My energy to create waxes and wanes so—to combat that—I’ve set up stations around my house with different materials. My bedroom desk is for colored pencils, watercolors, and gouache; my living room houses my loom; and my basement stores my oil paints and an easel. I’m thankful to have space to spread out and make multiple types of work.
What are your favorite materials to use? Most unusual?
My answer changes depending on the day! I’ve been loving my return to colored pencils. When I use them, I feel connected to my younger self.
As for the strangest material, stinging nettle (urtica dioica) is probably at the top of the list. Nettle is kind of a miraculous plant found along gardens, streams, and lakes. It grows across North America, but here, in New England, it’s considered an invasive plant species since it grows quickly and outcompetes a lot native plants. As the name suggests, stinging nettles do in fact sting. They have microscopic hypodermic needles lining their stems. Despite their prickly and skin-irritating exterior, nettles are high in nutrients and play an important role in the history of textiles.
Nettles can grow up to eight feet tall, meaning they have gorgeously long fibers that can be used to spin yarn. For a research project in school, I harvested and retted nettle plants. I was able to extract the fibers from their pithy wood centers, however, I haven’t had the tools to hackle and spin them yet! I guess this project is in progress. I’d love to weave or sew with these fibers in the future.
What historical and contemporary artists inspire you?
I’m inspired by figure painters like Aubrey Levinthal, Madeline Donahue, Sasha Gordon, Celeste Rapone, Genevieve Cohn, and Lorena Torres. I also love the works of Andy Li, Matthew Wong and Lois Dodd.
Other general sources of inspiration include the transcendental painting group of the late 1930s/ early 40s, Harriet Powers’s biblical quilt, Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell’s graveyard quilt, paleolithic venus sculptures, drawings of Nut (sky goddess of Ancient Egypt), and the Voynich Manuscript. My favorite cookbook, Vegetarian Epicure: Book Two, also deserves a special shout out.
When did you decide you wanted to be an artist?
I’ve always been creative, but I decided I wanted to be an artist when I was thirteen. Instagram was still relatively new and I quickly became enamored with the trend of creating hyper-realistic colored pencil drawings. Honestly, my obsession with colored pencils was great for channeling teenage angst.
Though my practice looks really different now (and is sourced from a much more joyful place), I was lucky to have incredible high school art teachers who nurtured my interest in the arts. Mrs. Gustafson, Ms. Lehn, and Ms. Gaivoto were the backbone to the public school’s art program; they made it seem like the sky was the limit in their classrooms. I have memories of Mrs. Gustafson painting on lunch duty and in the classroom alongside her students. My teachers showed me what sustaining a life-long love for art looked like. They were the ones who gave me the courage to pursue art in college. I’m forever thankful for them and their unconditional support.
