The JXM Show: Paint Beyond Fear
What happens when two lifelong friends, now studio partners, push themselves outside their comfort zones? The JXM Show is the first collaborative exhibition by Jordi Rowe and Maeve Billings, working together as the artist duo “JXM”.
Over the a period of four months, Jordi and Maeve challenged themselves with eight self-directed prompts designed to disrupt routine, spark risk-taking, and unlock new creative approaches. The result: more than 20 paintings born from trust, curiosity, and deep artistic collaboration. These works are raw, new, and unpolished. Each one was a test-drive, and there were no do-overs.
This show isn’t just a culmination of experiments; it’s the beginning of something bigger. JXM is about making the artist spaces they want to see in their local community. You’re invited to join that vision.
Welcome to the studio. Welcome to The JXM Show.
Wishing for More Time
Jordi Rowe
Oil and acrylic on panel, 20” x 36” installed, 2025
Conversation
Maeve Billings
Oil, pastel, and oil stick on Yupo, mounted on panel, 24” x 28” installed, 2025
Sold
1
multi-panel
Working with the identical constraints of modular supports, each artist responded through the lens of their own studio habits and visual instincts. Both works share a curiosity about how painting functions across space, whether as a seamless illusion or as an object broken into parts. The result is a dual meditation on fragmentation, continuity, and the unique ways two minds can shape one shared prompt.
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Wishing for More Time utilizes thin layers of color, manipulated through dripping, wiping, and texturing. Painted initially as a whole and then disassembled, the work reflects a balance between improvisation and control—one where the orientation was discovered in the process. This piece explores the modular grid as a potential infinity; the panels are treated as fragments of a boundless field, their composition resisting hierarchy or orientation.
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In contrast, Conversation takes a more structured approach: two panels carefully constructed as a unified scene, with two deer skulls in conversation with each other under a shared light source. Here, the panels are discrete but tightly composed, drawing focus to continuity and internal dialogue. Background elements and shadows cross the physical boundaries of the panels, implying a continual space.
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2
subject matter
Departing from their familiar motifs and visual vocabularies, each artist took on the thematic or figurative content typical of the other. The result is a pair of works that playfully blur authorship. Together, these two paintings reflect a productive discomfort: the act of stepping into someone else’s visual world without losing your own. The collaboration highlights both differences and surprising overlaps in their individual processes, and the pieces form a double portrait of two artistic practices seen through each other’s eyes.
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What Have You Done? borrows directly from Maeve’s recurring imagery of skulls, rendered here in radiant, near-rainbow hues. Though referential in nature, this painting relies instead on instinctual brushwork, saturated color mixing, and compositional invention. A vertical painted stripe lends a sense of containment and structure, echoing the feel of old book spines or archival illustrations. Painted in oil with minimal preliminary drawing, the piece evolved quickly, maintaining looseness and immediacy even within the constraints of the borrowed subject.
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Parking Lot Awe embraces Jordi’s process of abstracting a landscape, specifically a parking lot backlit by a twilight sky. Glow, blur, and motion are central to the piece’s sensibility, evoking the feeling of dark clouds and car headlights through color and form, rather than literal representation. This piece utilized masking, pouring, and varnishing to enhance specific visual moments, allowing soft edges to contrast with rigid, gridded drips. A glowing pink edge nods both to the original sunset source and Jordi’s affinity for luminous borders.
What Have You Done?
Jordi Rowe
Oil and spray paint on panel, 12” x 12”, 2025
Parking Lot Awe
Maeve Billings
Acrylic, oil, spray paint, and pastel on canvas, 12” x 12”, 2025
Sold
The Fog Lifted
Jordi Rowe with own palette
Oil, acrylic, oil stick, and spray paint on canvas, 24” x 24”, 2025
Sold
East Slope Sunrise
Jordi Rowe with Maeve's palette
Oil and spray paint on canvas, 24” x 24”, 2025
Sold
Opossum Arrangement #1
Maeve Billings with own palette
Oil on canvas, 30” x 24”, 2025
$400
3
palette exchange
For this third collaboration, the artists challenged each other with a complete material swap. Each created a unique palette for the other to use, then produced one painting with their own palette and one with the other’s. Jordi’s palette was an unruly mix of spray paint, loose pigment, acrylic, oil, and oil stick. Maeve’s was a rigorously planned set of 49 oil colors arranged in massive piles. As a control, both artists attempted to make the same painting twice. By reducing nearly all variables except materials, the project placed a unique spotlight on the ways artists respond to (or resist) their tools, and how much of a painting’s identity lives in the medium, not just the hand.
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Jordi began with Maeve’s structured palette of oil paint, arranging the colors into various jars to play with flow and opacity. Although it uses every single color, East Slope Sunrise feels remarkably unified because of the careful application of otherwise disjointed colors. Then, she had the challenge of recreating a painting’s composition in opposite materials, changing out the heavier all-oil palette for her more familiar and eclectic materials in The Fog Lifted. While opposite in mood, the similar compositions imply a shift in time rather than location, harkening back to Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series.
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Maeve began with their own palette, establishing their composition in familiar territory before moving the Jordi’s mixed media palette. Working with unfamiliar tools forced a more experimental approach, with layered textures and drips becoming part of the visual language. The second painting embraces the unruliness of the mediums, letting thick oil stick marks build upon soft spray-painted colors. Without the ability to mix their own colors, recreating the composition became especially challenging, and shifted the feeling of the painting from colorful but stable to colorful and chaotic.
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Opossum Arrangement #2
Maeve Billings with Jordi's palette
Oil, acrylic and spray paint on Yupo paper, 32” x 30”, 2025
$250
4
support swap
In this experiment, each artist threw down the proverbial gauntlet by preparing a painting surface for the other. Jordi received a smooth, synthetic Yupo panel—slick, stable, and carefully mounted—while Maeve was given three square panels with rough, heavily textured gesso. The goal was both playful and intentional: to push one another out of familiar material territory and provoke new artistic decisions through unexpected surfaces.
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In working on Everybody Out of the Pool, Jordi embraced the unpredictable. In using an unfamiliar surface, materials misbehaved. Spray paint bubbled into craters and watercolor spread in puddles, contrasting crisp borders of tape-masked oil paint. The resulting piece evokes pastel-toned, sunlit water and a surreal, chlorinated dreamscape: playful, artificial, and layered with light. The smooth surface resisted control but rewarded improvisation, producing a luminous, shifting visual experience.
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Maeve approached these three panels with a mind towards problem-solving. The rough, unsanded gesso created both an absorbent and textured surface. Spray paint was applied to seal the absorbent ground, and the prominent gesso brushstrokes became compositional cues. The final paintings depict Sphynx kittens nursing, their wrinkles echoing the panel’s unruly surface. What began as a frustrating material challenge evolved into a meaningful exchange between subject and support.
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Latched, Kneaded, and Bunched
(Top to bottom)
Maeve Billings
Oil and spray paint on panel, 12”x12” each, 2025
$300 each
Everybody Out of the Pool
Jordi Rowe
Oil, acrylic, watercolor and spray paint on Yupo, 11” x 14”, 2025
Sold
Tilt
Jordi Rowe
20” x 24”, spray paint and oil on canvas, 2025
5
shaped canvas
For this project, the artists each painted on an oval-shaped canvas, a first for both. They embraced the challenge of creating works that respond directly to the oval’s unique form. The challenge extended beyond formal concerns to perceptual ones, as the oval shape resists traditional grid-based composition, requiring a reconsideration of space, edge, and orientation. Despite opposite subject matter and approach both works are anchored by the shape itself. The oval isn’t decorative; it’s directive.
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Tilt presents a divided seascape with half cloudy sky and half sunset water. The horizon is deliberately misaligned with the vertical axis of the oval, producing a destabilizing tilt that encourages viewers to mentally rotate the work. Its graphic simplicity, reminiscent of a porthole or spinning lens, evokes motion and multiple orientations, emphasizing the shape’s influence on perception.
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In contrast, Bowl offers a top-down view of a metal mixing bowl filled with loose, painterly representations of raw meat. The bowl presses almost entirely against the canvas edge, with its curved form mirroring the oval perimeter, creating a sense of containment and tension. The work is visceral and intimate, reflecting a domestic scene through expressive brushwork.
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Bowl
Maeve Billings
24” x 20”, oil on canvas, 2025
Sold
6
30-minute painting
This challenge asked both artists to create a finished painting in exactly thirty minutes. The setup was intentionally stressful: no preparation beyond palette-mixing, no interruptions, and no time to revise. With the clock running, the emphasis shifted from control to instinct. The resulting works are records of urgency, improvisation, and the split-second decisions that shape a composition. By pushing past hesitation and perfectionism, the artists challenged their habits and uncovered their instincts under pressure.
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Beach-ish takes a loose approach to an outdoor scene. Yellows, blues, and oranges dominate the composition, colliding in unexpected ways across layered surfaces. Cardboard masks and quick shifts between materials create sharp edges and atmospheric moments, with one bold spray-painted line bisecting the image in a jarring, satisfying break. The result is a composition that feels at once expansive and off-kilter—precise in motion, but shaped by spontaneity.
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Studio Lunch centers on a tin of anchovies, an object chosen for its familiarity, tied to routine lunch breaks and quiet studio time. Rendered in oil over a smooth substrate, the colors drip and slide into each other, almost shimmering. Loose, gestural brushwork convey both the texture of the fish and the immediacy of time running out. Despite the constraint, the painting holds stillness and clarity.
Beach-ish
Jordi Rowe
Oil, oil stick, acrylic, and spray paint on canvas, 12” x 16”, 2025
Sold
Studio Lunch
Maeve Billings
Oil and oil stick on Yupo on panel, 14” x 11”, 2025
Sold
Synesthesia Bull Terrier
Jordi Rowe
Oil and spray paint on canvas, 20” x 16”, 2025
Sold
7
synesthesia bull terrier
Drawn from a prompt submitted by Brett Shaheen of Shaheen Gallery, this pairing challenged both artists to work from outside their comfort zones. With no further instruction, the prompt left wide interpretive space: visualizing a dog through an altered lens. Both artists embraced slippage, abstraction, and perceptual play, allowing elements of confusion, recognition, and delight to overlap.
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Jordi’s bull terrier floats in a hyper-saturated world of color daubs and party-like confetti. Painted on top of an old canvas, the background texture seeps through, creating unpredictable shifts in surface and tone. The image slips between representation and excess, where a single blue-toned head dissolves into visual noise. Despite its abstraction, subtle attention to anatomy anchors the piece in recognizable structure.
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Maeve’s version leans into multiplicity: five bull terrier heads rendered in rhythmic repetition, emerging and receding from a patterned ground. The background, spray-painted over wallpaper-like stencils, acts as both texture and midtone, while oil paint adds sharp definition and movement. The resulting image wavers between graphic flatness and painterly forms.
Synesthesia Bull Terrier(s)
Maeve Billings
Oil and spray paint on canvas, 20” x 45”, 2025
Sold
8
mash-up
Created as the final piece in their collaborative series, this prompt asked each artist to begin with three identically prepared panels. From this starting point, they developed independent compositions that now interlock. The result is a loose pairing: two distinct works that share an origin point but diverge in tone, content, and approach. Both artists treated the prompt as a kind of summation, borrowing techniques, materials, and lessons from earlier challenges while allowing space for surprise and instinct.
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Jordi’s response builds out a continuous landscape of a dark, wintry treeline across all three panels. Painted as a single horizontal composition, the piece maintains a sense of cohesion and stillness, using depth and repetition to evoke a cold night scene. The spray-painted base becomes a distant sky, while layered brushwork adds depth to the foreground. Cool blues and warm reds anchor the image in both artists’ shared color language. Subtle and expansive, the painting offers a quiet counterpoint to its companion’s density and movement.
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​Maeve’s panels combine various visual interpretations of flesh into a single, slithering hybrid. Forms are fluid and hard to pin down, hovering between abstraction and figuration. Using a limited but high-impact palette, they play with scale, texture, and recognition, pushing their fascination with the body into new and surreal territory. The spray-painted ground peeks through like cut paper, contrasting with assertive brushwork and sculptural oil passages. Together, these elements produce an image that feels at once visceral and elusive.
Winter Lodge Pole Pines 1, 2, and 3
Jordi Rowe
Oil, acrylic and spray paint on panels, 16” x 12”, 2025
$300 each
Heaped
Maeve Billings
Oil and spray paint on panels, 16” x 38” installed, 2025
$900
