Biography

Jeff Nisbet is an artist and full time visual arts educator at The Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. He works mostly within the purview of painting and drawing and is interested in having his work exist within installation environments. His work has been shown in Hawaii, California, Texas, and Massachusetts, and is in private collections in the United States and Canada.

Born in Canada, having lived in Scotland and Spain, and growing up in the Texas, Nisbet brings a worldly curiosity to his artistic practice. Working in abstraction, Nisbet’s work draws inspiration from a myriad of sources, from Zen Buddhist koans to Neo-Expressionist brushwork. Currently, his new body of work, Meditations, serves as a meditational practice, and his goal is to inspire the viewers to search for their stillness. In today’s ever-evolving world, particularly in the realm of geopolitics, the apocalypse that is AI , and pervasive social media in direct connection to crumbling mental health, this body of work is created to calm both artist and viewer. Nisbet encourages, insists, the viewer to disconnect and spend time with the work, even for just a moment.

Additionally, Nisbet finds inspiration in both the simplicity and grandeur of nature, whether a single flower or a vast landscape. By oscillating between abstraction and expression, he continues to distill natural subjects into expressive moments. Lately, Nisbet has been drawn to the play of shadows cast from white orchids and snapdragons in his studio. The enduring power of the orchid has been used as a natural stress reliever throughout history, while the snapdragon symbolizes resilience because of its ability to grow in difficult terrain.

Nisbet earned his Masters of Art Education at Boston University, focusing his research on using broad themes of identity to engage student voice in the secondary art classroom. He earned his Bachelors of Fine Arts in drawing and painting with distinction from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, studying under Jason Willome and Debra Drexler.

Nisbet currently with his wife, Kayla, and three children in Franklin, MA.