The last thing Jess Le Clerc remembers before blacking out and having a prolonged seizure is telling a joke.
It was 2020 and the director of Art School Co at Buderim was addressing a group of aspiring artists from all over Australia who were attending her four-day oil painting masterclass. One of Jess’ students was a doctor who recognised her seizure was likely due to a brain bleed and not epilepsy or any other cause.
The data the doctor was able to provide Sunshine Coast University Hospital fast-tracked Jess’ treatment and she was flown by helicopter to the Royal Women’s Hospital in Brisbane. It just so happened one of Australia’s best vascular brain surgeons, John Clouston, was on duty and he performed life-saving brain surgery. It was either serendipity or Jess had an angel looking over her shoulder that day.
The mother-of-four says she woke the morning of the workshop with a monstrous, vomit-inducing headache that she just was unable to shake. She’d suffered from chronic headaches for 10 years prior, which doctors had dismissed as “hormonal”, but this one was different.
“I needed to call in sick terribly but couldn’t.”
Post-surgery, the doctors had to break the devastating news to her husband Dylan and their children that although Jess had survived, they were pretty certain she had no brain function and that she might not wake up. But a brain scan does not reveal everything. Jess did wake up, but at first, she was blind and unable to talk. She recovered those faculties, but then she got stuck “in a loop”.
“You know that movie with Drew Barrymore, 50 First Dates, where she repeats the same day? That happened to me for about a day, where I would ask, ‘what happened?’, they’d tell me what happened and then I would ask the same question again.”
The doctors didn’t know how long Jess might be stuck in this loop, but she kept on recovering. Jess was meant to be in rehab for 18 months, but after a month in hospital, the doctors conceded “something amazing has happened” and she was able to go home.
What happened next though was an unexpected twist in an unfolding drama that was very real and very scary, for Jess.
The first follow-up scan showed the aneurysm they’d fixed had created a new aneurysm.
“That was actually worse than the aneurysm itself because I’d just got through everything and was trying to process the fact I wasn’t dead and they told me it failed. I was bleeding into my brain again and they had to figure out a new plan,” she says.
“The hardest part was they didn’t know what to do… I had six months without a plan and that was the scariest because every day I was like, ‘oh am I going to die today?’.
“It was hard for the kids living with someone who was facing that. It was really terrifying for us all.”
The surgery the medical team came up with, which was a new technique, had a 50 per cent mortality rate. Jess’ chance of survival literally came down to the toss of a coin.
“So, the surgery worked,” Jess candidly states.
“It has influenced my life greatly because I really appreciate being alive.
“It’s why I’m now making this kind of art, which is a celebration of life and the beauty of being alive and the beauty of being with one another and in nature.”
The day I visited Jess at her studio she was working on an oil painting called Nocturnal – an evocative depiction of female figures in a moonlit landscape. It was painting number 31 out of 36, which Jess was set to complete in a 12-month period for her first solo show, Natura (Brisbane, September 19-20).
“Natura is Latin for being under the natural sky, so all my paintings are of figures in landscape, and these figures are experiencing the wonder of embodiment in nature, of what it feels like to be immersed in impossible beauty.”
It’s more than an exhibition, it’s an immersive show, which pairs Jess’ paintings with original poetry by Anna McGahan and music by Brett Anthony Shaw, written and composed in direct response to how the art made them feel.
“As you move through the show, language and sound guide you, helping you connect more deeply with the paintings and the stories they hold,” she says.
Jess is one of five children who grew up on a dairy farm in country Victoria, “in a tiny community with about 10 houses”.
The first time Jess was “let loose as an artist” was when her parents, who observed her talent for craft-making, gave the teenager her entire bedroom as a canvas and let her paint the walls, the ceiling and the floor. “It was the ’90s, so I painted dolphins and sunflowers and stars and moons,” she laughs.
The self-taught artist claims making art is hard work, but anyone can learn to be an artist.
“The biggest question people ask me is, ‘who in your family was creative?’, like I was given a magical baton, but I’m from a dairy farm, absolutely nobody gave it to me, there’s no one in my past who made art,” Jess says.
“And so, when I started to realise that you could learn it, it really made me want to share it with other people because I always felt I couldn’t be an artist because I wasn’t good at it.
“And I wasn’t good at it. I’m being very honest, I’m not being humble, I really wasn’t and I learnt it. I don’t think you can teach very well unless you have to learn something.”
While we talk, Jess works and reworks the small but important focal part of her Nocturnal painting. She confides that producing paintings on a large scale in a short timeframe is akin to building a concrete structure.
“Marathon runners put it really well. They say we just stack the bricks. So, to build a house, you just go and put a brick on a brick,” she says.
“I think when it comes to art-making, people have such a weird idea that it’s this magical thing that comes to you that doesn’t come to other people and it just is an epiphany, and then you just deliver it to the masses.
“And I would say it’s very hard work, you have to believe in what you’re doing and then you have to go stack the bricks.
“I have to make the work and keep making the work that I believe in, it’s actually quite a job.”
Jess paints all sorts of people, but it’s generally people she has a close relationship with. “I think the most honest story I can tell is painting people I know.”
She paints in a representational, traditional method.
“I do love European art, I love John Singer Sargant. I like well painted, which is so tricky to explain, expressive work.
“I particularly like figures, the posturing of human beings, which a lot of my heroes also did. They were always looking for wonder and posture.”
Jess attended a parent-run home school and sat next to Dylan, her husband of 24 years, throughout high school. Jess says they weren’t childhood sweethearts. It wasn’t until Jess moved to Sydney to work with a volunteer organisation called Youth Alive that they fell in love – via the post.
Jess and Dylan were church pastors in their youth, but Jess says she feels the great mystery of God now more than ever because she cheated death – twice.
“I think if anything actually, it feels more truthful because whatever God is, God is, I can’t control anything. All I can do is pay attention to the wonder.
“So, the wonder is where I’ve parked myself and I’m trying so hard to tune into the beauty that it is to be alive and the beauty that it is to seek, and that’s where I’m spending my energy, in trying to see God in everything and to know God in everything.”