about

As a visual artist, Jesse Mireles is a painter, printmaker, and graphic designer. He was born in Mexico but grew up in Toledo, Ohio, studying art and graphic design in high school and painting, graphics, and printmaking at the University of Toledo. Art has been his life's work, his recreation and his sanctuary. He has exhibited extensively garnering along the way wide recognition and honors including national and regional awards for his contemporary fine art. 

Mireles has exhibited at the Toledo Museum of Art, the National Center for Nature Photography, and various shows and galleries. The Toledo Museum of Art and galleries in Ohio, California, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine represent his work. In addition, he lectures, consults, and has served on design and art review panels for the Toledo Arts Commission and the Ohio Arts Council.

As an exhibiting contemporary artist, Mireles values his relationship with galleries that rep his work. He also enjoys collaborating with architects and interior designers and display craftsmen to meet design needs of home and commercial venues. His artwork provides an abundance of color schemes, textures and scales for some of the most challenging spaces. He is a multi-disciplinary artist. His hand crafted creations range from small, framed pieces to 8 ft wide, wall art. His digital art has been produced to much bigger scales. 

His fine art paintings are abstract, expressionistic. His prints and collages are graphic, figurative compositions. With skills honed from block printing, lithography, and monotypes, Mireles applies those principles to create hand-drawn giclées, printed with archival quality inks on fine art papers.

As a child, Mireles' early influences were the colorful Mexican folk art on paper, pottery, and fabric that adorned his home. As a teen, he strongly identified with the work of the great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orosco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Later, as a young artist, he was attracted to European and American Expressionists. He was drawn especially to the work of German artist Franz Marc, by Marc's use of vivid color and to his beautiful portrayal of the natural world. 

But from his early paintings, Mireles found himself diving into experiments with paints with no purpose other than to push his medium as far as it could take him. Mixing, scraping, brushing, and layering paint onto canvas, masonite and wood, he observed the response of the paint as he constructed non-representational compositions. Mireles was on his way to becoming an abstract expressionist.

As always, the natural world is his greatest inspiration. He always requests window seats during flights to study farmlands, mountains, and shorelines from above. And, whether on the shores of New England, where he resides, the Great Lakes Region where he grew up, or in his travels along the rugged coast of Maine, the American Southwest, Canada, and his native Mexico, he is busy sketching the next canvas. Everywhere are influences for new compositions. Sometimes those inspirations are in clouds or reflecting waters, but sometimes in the faces of people he meets.