Inside the Studio: Jean Nestares
For this week’s Inside the Studio, Art Dealer Street speaks with Jean Nestares, an artist whose practice moves fluidly between photography, painting, writing, illustration, and wearable art. Across these forms, her work is guided by storytelling, memory, beauty, and the quiet transformation of images into lived experiences.
Jean’s creative path began with photography in Madrid and expanded through cinematography, television production, painting, illustration, and textile-based work. Having lived and worked across cities including Madrid, Ibiza, Caracas, Paris, Milan, Mexico City, New York, and Chicago, she brings a deeply layered sense of place, color, rhythm, and movement into her artistic language.
In this conversation, Jean reflects on the relationship between image and body, the emotional meaning of fabric, the slow unfolding of beauty, and her experience presenting her work at Clio Art Fair.
Read on to learn more in an exclusive interview with Jean Nestares:
Your practice moves across photography, painting, writing, illustration, and wearable art. How do these different creative forms come together in the way you tell stories?
I don’t think of these practices as separate disciplines, but as different ways of approaching the same story. Photography allows me to observe and hold onto a moment; painting and illustration let me transform it through color, intuition, and imagination. Writing gives me another kind of space to explore memory, language, and the emotional layers behind an image. With wearable art, the story becomes embodied—it moves beyond the frame and into the physical world.
What connects everything is my interest in people, memory, and the small details that often go unnoticed. An image can become a painting, a thought can become a text, a memory can take the form of something you wear. I follow those connections intuitively.
For me, storytelling is less about choosing one medium than allowing the story to determine what form it needs.
You describe wearable art as a way of letting your art “escape from the studio walls” and come to life on moving bodies. What first drew you to transforming your visual work into fabric and garments?
I think what first drew me to wearable art was the idea that an image didn’t have to remain still or belong only on a wall. I wanted the work to have a body, to move, to interact with people and with the space around it.
Fabric also brings a different intimacy to the work. It can be touched, worn, carried, and lived with. When an image becomes a garment, it takes on movement and a kind of vulnerability—it becomes part of someone’s presence rather than simply something to look at.
I was interested in that transformation: taking something that begins as an image and allowing it to become an experience. In that sense, wearable art feels like a natural extension of my practice. It lets the story leave the studio and enter everyday life.
Although you do not sew, you design fabrics and compose unique garments. How do you approach fabric as an artistic surface, and how is it different from working on canvas, paper, or photography?
I don’t sew, but I think of myself as someone who composes with fabric in the same way I would compose an image. I design surfaces, rhythms, and visual narratives that later come to life through garments and the people who wear them.
Fabric, for me, is a living surface. Unlike canvas or paper, it is never static—it folds, stretches, drapes, and responds to the body. That movement changes everything. A print is no longer just an image; it becomes something that shifts with light, gesture, and time. It introduces unpredictability, which I find very inspiring.
Compared to photography or painting, where I can control the frame quite precisely, working with fabric requires a different kind of thinking. I have to imagine how an image behaves in space, how it wraps around a form, how it fragments or aligns when it moves. It’s less about a fixed composition and more about designing a visual experience in motion.
In that sense, fabric expands my practice. It pushes the work out of stillness and into life, where the image is no longer observed from a distance but encountered through the body.
Your artistic path began with photography in Madrid and later expanded through cinematography, television production, painting, and illustration. How has your background in visual storytelling shaped your current work?
What first drew me to visual storytelling was photography in Madrid, where I learned to think through framing, light, and timing. That way of seeing naturally expanded into moving image, where I became interested in rhythm and narrative over time.
From there, painting and illustration allowed me to slow the image down, while writing gave me access to what sits behind it. Today, textile design brings all of this together: it introduces movement and transformation, so the image is no longer fixed but lived with.
In a way, I’m always working with the same language—just translated into different states of motion.
You have lived and worked across cities including Madrid, Ibiza, Caracas, Paris, Milan, Mexico City, New York, and Chicago. How have these different places influenced your sense of color, image, movement, and beauty?
Each city I’ve lived in has left a different emotional trace in the way I see, almost like layers of a visual language that keeps evolving.
Madrid gave me structure—an early awareness of light as something almost architectural, and of timing as precision. Ibiza, on the other hand, loosened everything. It taught me to trust intuition, to see silence and emptiness as part of the composition.
In Caracas, everything felt heightened; contrast became emotional as much as visual. Paris refined my gaze and introduced restraint—the idea that what you remove is as important as what you keep. Milan deepened my relationship with material, with design as something built through intention and texture.
Mexico City brought simultaneity: history, symbolism, and visual noise all existing at once. New York introduced speed and fragmentation, a constant negotiation with movement. And Chicago gave me a different kind of clarity—light, weather, and space shaping a very precise sense of form.
All of these places continue to inform how I think about image, color, and rhythm. For me, beauty is never fixed; it shifts with geography, memory, and the way you learn to look.
Your statement speaks about beauty as something that requires dialogue and time, rather than something immediately simple or obvious. What does beauty mean to you in your own artistic practice?
For me, beauty is never immediate or self-evident. It is not something that exists as a fixed quality within an image, but something that gradually reveals itself through attention, time, and relationship.
I understand beauty as something deeply relational—it emerges in the dialogue between light and shadow, structure and intuition, presence and absence. The different places I’ve lived have shaped this perception in distinct ways: each one has offered a different rhythm, a different way of seeing, but none of them define beauty on their own. Instead, they accumulate into a more layered understanding of it.
In my practice, I am drawn to what resists instant resolution. I’m interested in the tension between what is visible at first glance and what only becomes apparent after sustained looking. Beauty, for me, lives in that unfolding—where perception is not static, but constantly evolving through memory, context, and time.
You have also written and illustrated children’s books, including Taking Flight, The Art of Falconry, and Tick Tock Blue Planet. How does storytelling for children connect with the visual worlds you create as an artist?
For me, working on children’s books is very close to the heart of my practice, because it brings storytelling back to its most direct and instinctive form. Children don’t separate image and imagination in the way adults often do—they read visually, emotionally, and intuitively all at once.
When I worked on books like Taking Flight, The Art of Falconry, or Tick Tock Blue Planet, I was interested in creating worlds that could be both informative and poetic, where facts and imagination could coexist naturally. It’s a space where I can be playful with narrative, but also very precise with imagery.
I also love the idea that a child might encounter an image and build an entire universe around it. In that sense, illustrating for children feels very aligned with my broader practice: it’s about opening doors rather than closing meanings. And sometimes, I think children are the best art critics—they see things with a clarity and honesty that adults often forget.
You participated in Clio Art Fair, which supports independent artists and direct visibility. What was that experience like for you, and how did it feel to present your work within that international art fair context?
Participating in Clio Art Fair was a very meaningful experience for me, especially because of its focus on independent artists and direct visibility. It creates a space where the dialogue with the audience is immediate and unfiltered, which feels very aligned with how I approach my practice.
Presenting my work in that international context allowed me to see how different audiences respond to the same visual language, and how personal yet universal storytelling can be. There is something very powerful about being outside of the traditional gallery system and instead engaging directly with collectors, curators, and visitors who are discovering the work in real time.
What I appreciated most was the sense of openness. It felt less about hierarchy and more about exchange—about conversations, curiosity, and genuine connection. In that environment, the work doesn’t just exist as an object; it becomes part of a living dialogue, which is ultimately what I am always trying to create through my practice.
Jean Nestares’ work reminds us that art does not always have to remain still. It can move from image to text, from wall to fabric, from memory to body. Her practice is built through translation: a photograph becomes a painting, a story becomes an illustration, a visual idea becomes something worn and carried through the world.
Through her layered approach to storytelling, Jean invites us to slow down and look again. Beauty, in her work, is not immediate. It asks for time, attention, and dialogue. It unfolds gradually, through movement, memory, and the spaces between what is seen and what is felt.
You can learn more about Jean Nestares and her work via these links: Website: Jean Nestares Instagram: @nestaresjean
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