A Seattle Grunge Artist Still Has “Heart”

By Rachel Belle

Listen to Seattle Grunge Artist Still Has “Heart”

Jesse Higman is a Seattle artist who has worked, and developed close friendships, with some of the most famous Seattle grunge bands. He was in the trenches when the grunge movement exploded:

“I do remember the Nirvana Nevermind release party,” he says, “and getting covered in dip from Kurt [Cobain].”

But, for Jesse, making art isn’t as simple as picking up a paintbrush because he is a quadriplegic.

“I was a teenager driving a sports car that my dad and I had built and I swerved to miss a squirrel that had run out in the road. I had my driver’s permit so he was the passenger. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt so I was thrown out of the car. In the emergency room, my family came in after I was stable enough to see them, and I told my mom, ‘I know I’m not gonna be able to walk again, Mom, and that’s okay.’ And it has been relatively okay, and that’s the truth. Its been hard in all the ways that are imaginable, for sure. It’s a different chapter of life.”

As a kid, Jesse liked to draw, but it wasn’t until he was in the hospital that he started painting. Once he got out of the hospital and into his wheelchair, he started going to shows.

“I was a big fan of the band The Cult and followed them around like a puppy dog for a while when I was a teenager. I finally met them and Ian Astbury really took me under his wing. That was my introduction to Seattle music, and that was in ’89. He brought me to the Sorrento Hotel and introduced me to Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone, and Alice in Chains. I moved here a month later.”

Pretty soon those bands began to wear Jesse’s art.

“I painted on leather jackets, you know, it was a good way to advertise what I was doing. So I painted on a lot of people’s jackets. Then when people started needing t-shirts, they got more successful, they asked if I could help out.”

He designed a poster for Lollapalooza, painted designs for t-shirts, and posters and a guitar he painted for Mother Love Bone is in the permanent collection at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Most recently, Jesse did the cover art for Heart’s latest album, Red Velvet Car. But most of the art he does now is for himself.

“I, ironically, started to focus on movement and put down a paintbrush and started to go with the energy of water and how it moves when it’s poured. That happened by accident, but when I saw the first thing that felt like a composition to me, it was a miracle. It just looked like life itself and I thought ‘I could do this for the rest of my life.'”

Instead of paint brushes, Jesse uses measuring cups and pitchers to pour water and then paint onto a black masonite canvas, that’s basically a big board with a hole in the middle for the liquid to drain out of. When he paints, Jesse wears a metal brace on his left hand.

“Because my fingers are paralyzed, it articulates my wrist and it helps me to pick up a toothbrush or these cups of paints.”

The images are abstract, and Jesse has no control over the end result, but the images created sometimes look distinctly like birds or waves or women.

“The hard thing for me to remember, when doing this, is to be patient because there’s a lot of anxiety after taking a day to mix the colors up and get the right balance. Then you get to the table and it all happens so fast. There’s a lot of apprehension of not wanting to screw that work up.”

But he definitely has success. Last year one of his paintings was included in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s S. Dillon Ripley Center in Washington, D.C. I asked Jesse what he’s most proud of.

“That I figured something out that’s me. That when I’m alone and at my most down, that within in a little while I can take some comfort that all that work has added up to a potential future for me. That there are still possibilities no matter how hard life gets.”