My Painting Life

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Jillian is a contemporary abstract artist living in Cary, North Carolina. She attended the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she completed a BA in Art Education. After emigrating to the Southern US with her family, she opened seven children's art schools under license to Monart, as well as founding summer camps for gifted children at Queens University in Charlotte, which she ran for twenty years.

Since retiring in 2006, Jillian has immersed herself in her personal artistic practice. She continues to explore different ways of seeing and expressing her vision, attending workshops and critiques as well as reading widely.  Jillian enjoys collaborating with area artists, and she has created several collaborative art shows in the region.  

  I create abstract and semi-abstract paintings and mixed media collage. Color and composition are essential elements of my work. Energy, direction, focal point, and balance are important to me in my aim to create harmony and structure. Color palettes that are high contrast, complementary, and unconventional, characterize much of my work.
Originally from South Africa, my first introduction to art as a child, and later as a student, was my study of the great art masters of German Expressionism, the Nabis, and the Viennese Secession. These European movements, which were prevalent and influencing art in South Africa, made an indelible impression on me. A heavy application of paint, (known as impasto), the emotional intensity of gestural brushwork, and abstract expressions of ideas are all evidence of my influences and are found in my paintings today.
My painting approach is visceral. I boldly apply and remove layers using a constant, additive and subtractive method. I often begin by loosely wiping paint onto a canvas, board, or paper with a rag, then I add paint, and ephemera (materials otherwise intended to be short-lived in their use) to create form and structure. Scrubbing and peeling away the surface creates the process and results in the organic evolution of each work. My interest is in ancient history, architecture, and symbolic mark-making. Abstracting spaces like alleyways, arches, and pathways helps me to convey a sense of the mystery of antiquity, while also creating complex compositions with multiple fields of depth and perspective. I am strongly drawn to asemic writing, a type of mark-making that mimics calligraphy but does not hold semantic meaning. For me, it conveys the urgent need that people have always had to express themselves and communicate. This fluidity of line helps me in creating bold, expressive, and open meaning in mywork.