Meet Jesse Jarldane

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jesse Jarldane.

Hi Jesse, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
Hi! Thanks for having me, Voyager! It’s an honor. My name is Jesse and I’m a visual artist from Boulder, Colorado. I’ve recently graduated with a BFA from The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design (RMCAD) where I studied illustration.

I’ve wanted to create visual art for almost my entire life, since around the third grade when I saw some classmates drawing. The drawings were magical and something clicked, like it was my life’s purpose to create. Since then I’ve explored many different routes of creativity from blacksmithing, woodworking, and making furniture, as well as a 7-year-long career in welding.

When I decided to pursue visual art as a career, I had a lot of enthusiasm, and inspiration, but had no idea what I wanted to make. I was aimlessly making whatever inspired me at the moment, and because of that, I didn’t have a lot of cohesion throughout my body of work. In a really funny way, that cohesion arrived when I adopted a 13-year-old cat.

I always thought I was a dog person – not really thinking twice about cats and having pretty unpleasant interactions with the ones I did run into. One day, my girlfriend sent me a picture of this 13-year-old gray cat that had been in a no-kill shelter in Denver for almost a year, and for some reason, I went and picked her up and brought her home. Looking back, I think the pandemic, lockdown, isolation, and all the strangeness and chaos in the world drove me to mix up my home life.

As an artist, I felt this great surge of inspiration and started drawing and painting cats, tons and tons of cats. I realized it was a perfect subject that would tie together the variety of disciplines I was learning. I decided that I would continue to explore whatever subject or medium inspired me, as long as I included a cat in it.

I started sharing my cat art on Instagram and last August went super viral. I went from around 400 followers to 72,000, and it literally changed my life. Before I was uncertain if anything I was doing was a good idea, if pursuing a career in art was the right choice, or if I could actually make a living selling art, and the attention and boost in business that I saw from this growth really changed the way I viewed my own art. I realized it is possible to make a career out of doing something I love.

Outside of art, I love meditating, and personal growth, and I’ve taken up boxing as a way to stay active and get more physically fit. This past month I started a training camp Unite to Fight, an annual charity boxing event hosted by The Corner Boxing Club in Boulder, Colorado. I’m currently fundraising for The Wild Animal Sanctuary, and raffling off original paintings featuring different big cats the Sanctuary rescues.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I wouldn’t call my journey smooth by any means. I’ve had to overcome a lot of challenges in life, as everybody has in various degrees. In 2022 I was diagnosed with acute prostatitis. Saving the graphic details, I couldn’t pee at all. I was among 1% of the male population for my age in the United States who’ve experienced this really painful condition.

The traditional Western medicine solution was to either undergo an irreversible surgery – basically hacking parts of my body away, or go to universities and undergo experimental treatments. I managed to completely heal myself in 2.5 months using Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Meditations. I watched interviews and read his book Break the Habit of Being Yourself, and was intrigued by the testimonials of people healing from severe cases of cancer, tumors, and other diseases through meditation.

I started meditating every day in the mornings and putting all my attention every minute of every day on what life would feel like if I was healed from this condition. After a month of intensive meditation, I started noticing progress. And within a few months, I was completely back to normal. I went from not being able to squeeze a drop of urine out, to fully emptying my bladder, all through meditation!

This doesn’t necessarily relate to art in any way, but I really believe now that our minds and feelings have tremendous power that shapes our lives. I have realized that the way I think about things, my beliefs about my life, my art, or what is happening internally and externally is all something that should be investigated and considered. Is what we are experiencing and thinking really the truth?

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My artwork is all about cats. I love using and exploring different mediums, and I chose to use cats as a subject to keep some strand of focus between all the different styles I find myself having. I’m still in the process of discovering what my voice is, what I want to share, and the meaning of my work. As of right now, I share the joy and love I feel for cats and their hilarious natures and ways of being.

I tend to be very inspired by environments, moods, and styles. I love creating works of art that reflect a period of time, a location, or a feeling I have when I think about a landscape or cityscape. I had a huge Bladerunner/NeoTokyo kick that I was really inspired by that resulted in this collection of abstract series of paintings with silhouetted cats in the foreground.

What really keeps me excited and joyful is the variety of mediums I play in. I’ve noticed lately that my tendency is to make a body of work in a specific medium (most recently acrylic on wood panels) until I’ve exhausted the enthusiasm I have or I’ve used up the inspiration and moved on to another medium. It’s become this cyclical process of moving through and evolving my understanding of the medium, and then shifting to another. Right now I’m phasing out of acrylics and into pen and ink drawings.

I used to think that the only way to become known or recognized as an artist was to pick one thing – like acrylic painting, and then do that forever and become an expert in that one tiny realm. “Niching down” has been a term I’ve seen floating around, and whenever I really thought about it, I always felt constricted by having to limit myself to one thing. I guess I found a workaround to this by sticking to cats, but it’s allowed me the freedom to explore way more.

How do you think about luck?
I’m not sure I believe in luck. I think there is either alignment or there are beliefs and feelings that are in the way. I’ve had so many coincidences where I’m aligned and feeling good and things just fall into place. I think the external world we experience is a reflection of how we are feeling internally. If I’m feeling happy no matter the external circumstances, good things just happen. Maybe that could be called luck, but feeling joy, happiness, or any desirable emotion is a choice to some degree.

When I am aligned in that way, I notice my business performing better, the way people engage with me is better, and life in general is better. I’ve found that being in these higher emotional states is much more of an internal practice rather than a response to what’s happening in my life.

Even something like going super viral on social media and the incredible opportunity that has provided me. I think that experience was a form of alignment with where I was at the time. Of course, I am extremely grateful for all the good that I’ve experienced, and I think that our internal state is something more reliable to focus on to create the experiences we want instead of luck.

Contact Info:

• Website: jessejarldane.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/jessejarldaneart