Jessie Tyree Jenness @jessietyree - Tumblr Blog

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Formerly Jessie Tyree Creative, say hello to Root & Branch Paper Co! This one’s been under wraps for a while but it’s finally time to announce our new branding.🌿 Root & Branch is a fresh new stationery and lifestyle brand, inspired by the beauty of nature. We’re gearing up to release our first ever product collection in early 2018!! #rootandbranchpaper #smallbusiness

#smallbusiness #rootandbranchpaper

Practicing in color today... took the color palette from one of the kilim pillow covers on my couch! Haha! I typically like to work in neutrals or black and white but I’m trying to add a bit of color to my life. It’s a creative exercise (the kind you can do while sitting on the couch... pretty much the only exercise I can commit to).

It seems like pretty much everything I own has a little paint on it. Anyone else? 🙋🏼🤦🏼‍♀️ #messylife

#messylife

currently ben’s favorite song

Herrnhut, Germany.

A quiet little town on the very eastern edge of Germany, bordering the Czech Republic and Poland, where I lived in for half a year after graduating college. I lived in a farmhouse with 15 other girls, one of whom was four years old, all of whom were from homelands and backgrounds different than mine.

When I was here, I woke up at 6 every morning to beat the breakfast rush and have some precious peaceful time to myself. I went to many weeks of lectures on different aspects of the Christian faith. I heard a lot of things that resonated with me, and a lot that didn’t. I disagreed with many teachings and, through many failed attempts, I gained some much-needed practice on how to disagree gracefully. I wrote a book, which was mostly just a weird and sometimes funny mash-up of my half-processed thoughts on life after graduating university. I never read it. I gave away a lot of my personal possessions, in a holy frenzy of minimalism and who-knows-what-else. I learned how to live out of a suitcase, sleep on a child-size bunk bed, and share a shower with a houseful of girls for six months at a time. I saw some of my idealistic expectations for my life fade into more of a mature understanding of how to relate to the world around me. I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still talk to, through email and iMessage, sharing pictures and stories about where life has taken us since the Herrnhut days.

My roommate and friend Robyn took these photos in the fields around the farmhouse where we lived. She is a photographer and artist, studying in Canada. See more of her work here: http://www.robynadams.ca/

Waiting.

According to church tradition, this Sunday marked the first week of Advent, the week symbolizing hope, or, to use a word I find a touch more relatable, the week of waiting.

Today at work we were playing Christmas music, because it’s officially the appropriate time of year, but praise God my coworker had the good sense to avoid “Santa Baby” and other such atrocities. Instead I found myself pause to listen (for perhaps the millionth time) to that OH SO evocative chorus from O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

OH GOD, BRING ON THE TEARS.

Yes. I don’t really consider myself a super emotionally expressive person but in the moment I took to listen to these lyrics, which, thanks to a rigorous Christian upbringing, I have known by heart for the majority of my life, I found myself on the dangerous brink of becoming completely and utterly devoid of emotional control. Yikes.

O come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer Our spirits by thine advent here; Disperse the gloomy clouds of night, And death's dark shadows put to flight

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel

These words struck me hard today. Because, to be perfectly honest, now more than ever, my heart said that I need these words to be true. I need to know that Emmanuel, God with us, is not just a nice word or a nice concept. I need to know that God has and shall and will come to us. I need to know the gloomy clouds will be dispersed. I need to know that death will be conquered.

For much of my life, I have not needed these words to be true. I have lived in a peaceful place, not too polluted, not too violent. I have been sheltered and protected from the hardships of the world, like every kid should be. I have never seen war or famine. I have been a good Christian, obeyed most of the rules, made most of the older people proud. I haven’t really needed God.

I can’t really put my finger on what exactly has changed for me this year. But today I read in the news that the Smoky Mountains are engulfed in flames, my government is threatening to destroy sacred land in North Dakota, a team of soccer players and journalists were killed in a plane crash in Colombia, millions and millions are displaced from wars that took their homes and families, the election results in my country have already caused deep sorrow, hopelessness, and fear, for many good reasons, and there seems to be no end to the suffering the world endures.

This year I got married. Two days before the wedding I was in my car with my sister, on our way to my bachelorette party. Laurel asked if I’d heard “the news.” I hadn’t, so she told me that a truck had run over and killed 80 people in Nice, France. “Oh my God, how?! Couldn’t anyone stop the truck?!” I asked in shock. “It wasn’t an accident, Jessie. Someone drove the truck into a crowd.”

I spent the rest of that night eating chocolate fondue, drinking sangrias, laughing and dancing to Beyoncé, opening gifts and enjoying the wonderful party my sisters had planned for me, all the while with a lump in my throat. When I got home I shut myself in my bedroom, read the reports on the BBC, and wept. I wept with anger and grief because the news was so horrible and terrifying, but also with guilt and confusion because it was so incomprehensible in comparison with my life.

This year I am completely ashamed at how much I have failed to let my heart break for the wounds my world has endured. How I have accepted my life of privilege, a privilege that keeps me at a distance from the suffering, and closed myself up, stayed in my warm and cozy bed instead of embracing the world and all its grief and heartache. I am ashamed at how so often when I make huge “sacrifices” and strive to love the world, I am really striving to be of some good to somebody, to feel important and valuable and special, to make my life matter. I am ashamed at how I have fooled even myself.

This year I feel a desperate need for God himself to make a grand entrance, to do something, to help us. I need God to come and save us from the wildfires and the terrorist attacks and the plane crashes and the fear and the hopelessness. I need God to save me from my own blindness and apathy and self-centeredness, my own inability to comprehend the pain of the world. And though my own pain and confusion and heartbreak seems trite compared to that of the world, I need a God who can carry my burdens, too.

But when I pray sometimes I hear a lot of silence.

That’s why this song hit me so hard. It is absurd, it seems, to say “Rejoice!” when there is so much to grieve over. It seems absurd. It seems wrong to be happy in the face of so much suffering and pain. Hope seems like an inappropriate, insensitive response.

Today I remembered that Jesus was called a “man of sorrows.” That soothed me a little. I thought, how horrible if Jesus had been a jolly happy guy, like Santa. Ugh. I need a Savior who knows the suffering of the world. I cannot worship a God who is not much, much greater than me. I need a God who can teach me to love the world, to embrace its sorrows as my own. I don’t have any great revelations yet, but my heart goes back to that word for this week: “waiting.” In this Advent season of four weeks leading to Christmas, and of a lifetime lived in a world of suffering, I am waiting.

For God himself. For Emmanuel.

Lord, teach me how to wait.

The Age of Augustus, The Birth of Christ, by Jean-Léon Gérôme

What I’ve been reading these past couple months. Lots of good thoughts in these books... ranging from happy, clever, creative, peaceful, and calm to horrifying, haunting, eerie, and gritty. Ultimately, so very human.

My apartment in Asia was on the 13th floor of a massive apartment building overlooking a manmade lake in a smoggy city. These conditions provided me with the best lighting for constant photos of everything I ate or drank. Now I live in a little cave apartment under a stairwell... it’s cozy, but there is hardly any natural lighting, which isn’t helped by the fact that in winter in Norway the days are super short: the sun rises after I leave for work and sets before I get home. Hoping for the luxury of having natural lighting for photos in my next home :)

New favorite: Solange’s A Seat at the Table

Beautiful music, lyrics, videos, and a 112-page digital book to accompany.

I love art. I love this album not because it’s about me, but because it’s a beautifully creative and expressive body of work. Good art should give us the ability to see the world in a different way, to walk in each others’ shoes, to empathize with the struggles and triumphs of others. Hats off to Solange, she did it.

Bergen, Norway // October 2016

So lucky to have had a 3-day weekend... just enough time to decide to hop over to the west coast of Norway. It was 3 days of unusually sunny and (relatively) warm weather, fish ‘n chips, hikes up Mt. Fløyen, Norwegian art museums and wanderings around old neighborhoods near the harbor. So good to see a different side of Norway.

I’m obsessed.

From 2 Years Ago.

I posted this list two years ago and just re-discovered it...

These are life dreams that have yet to be fulfilled:

Launch an illustration business/print shop.

Start a nonprofit. Vague, but there it is.

Be a part of filming a documentary.

Help open a coffee shop that celebrates local community.

Travel to Iceland, Brazil, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. To name a few.

See a whale.

Visit and work on a coffee farm.

Paint gigantic murals in foreign cities.

Teach children photography.

Road trip around the US.

Live in a foreign country.

Publish a book.

Live in a log cabin.

Maybe an updated list would lose a few of the above and include:

Get my MFA

Be financially independent

Have a solo show

Learn to pour some really nice latte art

Go back to China

Make another coloring book

One of the most time-consuming (and memorable) elements of preparation for our wedding was the process of creating our backdrop. It was a huge process involving ten extremely dedicated helpers who put in a collective 100 hours of work!

I came up with the concept of a hanging paper cutting after seeing a similar style of work in China, inspired by traditional Chinese paper cuttings. The intricate details of the designs combined with the fragile nature of the rice paper made for an exquisite end product! Since Ben and I met in Asia, I wanted to include a subtle tribute to Chinese art in the creation of a hanging installation to serve as a key visual component of our wedding.

The design for the hanging was directly translated from the pattern I created for our invitation suite: a intertwining pattern of three super-simplified floral elements, each a reflection of Ben’s and my backgrounds. I incorporated basic shapes from honeysuckles and violets to represent my childhood in Tennessee, lupines in honor of Ben’s Norwegian heritage and ferns to represent his New Zealand heritage.

Like any creative project, this one developed and changed quite a bit throughout the process, but the end result was impressively close to what I had imagined. I’ve never dared to create anything this big before, and I was hardly prepared for the logistics of installing it! (Special thanks to my dad and father-in-law for helping out with that part). I’m really pleased with the end result, especially because now, these pictures are a reflection of the process and the huge amount of teamwork that went into making this project a reality!

You know the year has been too crazy when one of your all-time favorite musicians releases an album in APRIL and in SEPTEMBER you are FINALLY sitting down to listen to it all the way through. I feel like a bad fan (still love you Mr. Bird) but nonetheless this is a fantastic album.

My Alternate Career Path

You may or may not know this about me, depending on how well you know me, but this is the truth: I am a critical person. I love to critique things, most especially: food, art, movies, print design, web design, books, typography (omg), coffee, restaurants, cafés, shops, photography, writing, interior design, product design, handmade things, decorations, music, album art, anything made in photoshop, anything on pinterest, etc. etc. etc. (The list goes on and on).

For me, critique is an incredibly mentally stimulating exercise, and, when it’s done the right way, I also appreciate being on the receiving end of criticism. I regularly ask people who I respect to critique my stuff, and sometimes even to critique me. Right now, though, we are not talking about deep internal reflection... I’m talking about “Your colors don’t coordinate” kind of criticism. I owe this largely to the fact that I studied graphic design, and for my degree, I went through 4 years of proper criticism. No joke, for my very first assignment in my very first design class, my professor assigned a project and, on the due date, he picked one of my classmates and made her line everyone’s projects up on the wall from best to worst. (Talk about breeding some healthy competition, this is American education for you). For the rest of class, we all sat around and criticized our work. I loved it. I remember leaving that class feeling totally challenged and inspired and so excited to be studying design.

I realize that some people would feel totally uncomfortable being put under this sort of criticism, but when it’s presented professionally, I love it. Anyway, now that we understand how I think, let’s carry this over into the realm of cinema.

Naturally every time I watch a movie, I criticize it internally. I don’t try to do this, it just happens. I try not to voice my criticisms except in my own head, because sometimes I hear myself sounding too critical and it sounds snivelly, and I hope I’m not snivelly, especially not when I go out to a movie with friends and everyone wants to have a good time and then I’m that one person that has to criticize the actor’s portrayal of whatever.

Anyway, I was thinking the other day, wow, is there any better job than that of a film critic. Seriously, Roger Ebert anyone? I sometimes just read back through some of his archived film reviews for entertainment. Who needs to actually watch the movie when you have Roger to write about it? My assumption is that critics just watch movies and eat popcorn and take notes and pick them apart and savor every bit and then go to town with it, either trashing the bad stuff and praising the good stuff. Of course, each critic goes about this process in their own way, which makes the whole thing entertaining and witty in its own right. Being an overthinker, this is pretty much what I do everyday, about everything.

I’ve decided that if my current lifestyle doesn’t pan out, I’m going to open up shop as a freelance film critic. I know that my opinion about big Hollywood filmmakers’ life work isn’t in high demand, so I don’t expect to make big bucks out of this venture, but hey. Might be fun.

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