WELCOME

I’ve always been a visual person, drawn to shape, color, light, and motion. Nature centers me, sparks my creativity, and feeds my palette in ways I’m still discovering. It’s my oldest and most reliable collaborator.

I never plan a painting. I paint what I feel and how can I plan what I feel? Intuitive expression demands a certain uncompromising honesty: a willingness to look inside yourself, and then the courage to actually put it on the canvas. That’s the practice. Not just the making, but the showing up with enough openness to let something true come through.

I work large, often larger than my own body, because scale changes the experience. At that size, color, value, and contrast stop being compositional choices and become something physical. You don’t stand in front of the work; you enter it. That’s what I’m after: connection. The deeper I get into making, the deeper I drop into my own authentic space  and I want that energy, that emotion, to travel across to whoever is standing in front of the painting.

My background in design lives in the work too, in the underlying structure, the rhythm, the sensitivity to space and balance. But where design wants resolution, painting lets me sit with ambiguity, experiment freely, and follow the work wherever it wants to go. I never tire of exploring new tools, techniques, and materials. The possibilities feel genuinely endless and that, more than anything, keeps me at the canvas.

ABOUT JILL

My path was never a straight line. I studied fine art at the University of Michigan-photography, initially- then spent decades building a career as a design professional: marketing, brand development, experience design. I managed architects, interior designers, and graphic designers, helping create beautiful places and shape lasting brands. It was rewarding work. But somewhere along the way, I realized that in spending so much time directing other creatives, I had quietly stopped being one myself.

The pandemic gave me room to ask some honest questions about time, fulfillment, and what I wanted to make. Nature was the catalyst, slowing me down, drawing me outside, and eventually drawing me back to the studio. I returned to painting with a sense of freedom I hadn’t felt in years: freedom to experiment, to follow intuition, to give full voice to my own expression.

Today I work large-often larger than my own body-in acrylic, making immersive paintings where value, contrast, and unexpected color become the primary language. The decades I spent shaping how people move through and emotionally register environments never really left me. They show up in every canvas: in the structure, the scale, the sense of space. What changed is that now I’m the one inside the work.

Born in Indiana and raised in Michigan, I met my husband Doug at U of M, and we’ve spent our lives since then in motion-living and traveling the world, and raising our three kids in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’m still happily based.