Jessi Pfeffer is an American painter whose work explores the complicated relationship between people and the natural world; our desire to observe it, possess it, preserve it, and belong to it.

Water has long been at the center of her life and work. Before returning fully to painting, Pfeffer spent years along the Northern California coast, working around commercial fishing and diving. That experience gave her an intimate familiarity with fish not simply as beautiful subjects, but as living things intertwined with labor, livelihood, tradition, and place. Fish and water remain recurring subjects in her work, though increasingly they have become a way of speaking about something larger: memory, mortality, attachment, and the traces a life leaves behind.

Working primarily in watercolor and oil, Pfeffer moves between detailed studies of fish and wildlife, portraits, and paintings of objects marked by use. Old fishing tackle, weathered implements, animals, and solitary figures are treated with the same attention. She is drawn to things that carry evidence of having lived, to wear, imperfection, age, and the quiet histories held within ordinary objects.

Her watercolors often isolate their subjects against open space, borrowing something from the clarity of natural-history illustration while allowing the individual animal to remain strange, particular, and alive. Her oil paintings move into a darker and more atmospheric territory, where narrative is often implied rather than explained.

Across both bodies of work runs an interest in the uneasy intimacy between human beings and the natural world. Beauty and violence, tenderness and possession, life and loss are rarely far apart.

Pfeffer lives and works in Missouri. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and exhibitions across the United States and is held in private collections throughout the country.