Inside the painting: Ripples by Jessie Rose Ford
For this edition of Inside the Painting, we’re heading to Melbourne (Naarm), where oil painter and botanical artist Jessie Rose Ford has spent the last two years returning, again and again, to the same quiet stretches of water.
“Ripples,” a 58 × 44cm oil on linen completed in 2026, is one of those returns. It’s currently priced at AU$1,800 and was shown as part of “The Quiet Hours,” a group exhibition at Brunswick Street Gallery in Fitzroy that ran from 26 March to 12 April 2026. Ford also has work in this year’s Affordable Art Fair Melbourne, where prices across the fair run from AU$100 to AU$10,000, so “Ripples” sits comfortably in the accessible middle of that range, a genuinely collectable original, not a print, at a price a first-time buyer can seriously consider.
Who is Jessie Rose Ford
Ford works across two distinct practices that inform each other more than you’d expect. On one side, she’s a botanical artist, meticulous, observational, the kind of practice that earned her the Celia Rosser Medal for Botanical Art and a Highly Commended award from the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. On the other, she paints en plein air, working directly outdoors in front of the landscape, with a much looser, gestural hand.
“Ripples” comes from the plein air side of that practice. Her recent body of work, including the 2025 solo exhibition “Re-visiting” at Brunswick Street Gallery, has centred on a small set of places she keeps coming back to: the Merri Creek, the Yarra River, the Dandenong Ranges, the Murray River. “These places are often a tucked away quiet place next to water sources,” Ford has said of the series, describing sites just outside Melbourne that she’s returned to repeatedly over two years rather than painting once and moving on.
What’s actually happening in “Ripples”
The painting distills, in her words, “a simple moment of awe spent in nature,” built up through colour, play, and mark-making rather than tight representation. It’s part of a working method she describes as sensorial and immersive: painting on site, responding to light and movement in real time, rather than composing from photographs back in the studio. That immediacy is part of what a plein air piece is actually selling, not just an image of water, but the record of a specific hour, in a specific place, painted at the speed the light was changing.
Why this piece, and why now
We picked “Ripples” for two reasons that matter to how we think about value here. First, it’s a clean example of an artist with a real, verifiable practice, exhibition history, a named medal, a gallery relationship, a consistent multi-year body of work, priced at a level that reflects an early-to-mid career stage rather than either end of the extremes. Second, it’s a useful case study in how a specific, repeated subject (the same handful of places, visited over and over) builds a coherent, collectable series rather than a scattered one-off. Collectors and galleries both respond to that coherence; it’s part of what a gallery like Brunswick Street is implicitly vouching for when it puts a consistent body of work into a group show.
If you’re an emerging painter building your own body of work, Ford’s approach is a useful model regardless of medium: pick a small number of subjects or places that genuinely hold your attention, return to them, and let a body of work take shape from repetition rather than trying to cover new ground with every single piece.
Curious what a similarly-scaled painting from your own practice would be worth?
References
Brunswick Street Gallery, “Jessie Rose Ford | Ripples” - https://brunswickstreetgallery.com.au/products/jessie-rose-ford-ripples
Brunswick Street Gallery, artist page -
https://brunswickstreetgallery.com.au/blogs/artists/jessie-rose-ford
The Design Files, “Jessie Rose Ford Captures Dreamy Landscapes In New Exhibition” - https://thedesignfiles.net/news/jessie-rose-ford-brunswick-street-gallery
The Design Files, “The Must-See Artists At Melbourne’s Affordable Art Fair 2026” - https://thedesignfiles.net/2026/07/affordable-art-fair-melbourne-2026
Australian Arts Review, “Affordable Art Fair returns to Melbourne this August” - https://artsreview.com.au/affordable-art-fair-returns-to-melbourne-this-august-2/