“There was validation and hope.”
That’s how Jill Carver describes the impact of her first solo exhibition 14 years ago at the New Zealand Embassy in London. The paintings she showed at that event were ones she had done in New Zealand, while on a sabbatical from her job as a curatorial researcher at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She sold 10 of the 20 paintings she exhibited and was more than pleased. It would be several years, however, before she would take the plunge into fine art as a professional.
Now living in Austin, Texas, Carver was born and raised in England. As a child, she was quiet and opinionated and loved being outdoors. “I started da bling in drawing and painting,” she says. “It was a way to bring the outdoors indoors. It was very convenient for my Mom to have me shut in a room with a sketchbook.”
Jill Carver
Winter Meanderings
Oil
12″ x 30″
“The title is appropriate, because I do a lot of meandering. I love exploring off the beaten track. I think these more intricate and intimate views can say so much more about a place than a classic vista. I enjoy taking a scene that many might pass by and making it into something that feels powerful and iconic. And I think, for the viewer, it might recreate the sense of being in a place, rather than just looking at a place.”
Jill Carver
Quote Inscribed by the Wind
Oil
24″ x 30″
“Sometimes I just go out to paint with no preconceived notion of what I’m looking for, just to see what ideas come to me during the process of doing a series of studies. It’s my favorite way of functioning outdoors. I don’t so much go out to ‘find’ paintings, but just to look and to learn. It’s more of a responsive, meditative relationship with the land. This is Trout Lake, which is near my Colorado base in Rico, in the San Juan Mountains. It’s a spectacular location. While working there, I had noticed that, during otherwise very still afternoons, these dagger-like down drafts would sweep down from the mountainside and cut the mirror-life surface of the lake. Then they’d be gone as quickly as they appeared. I like how they divided up the foreground, so I spent some time in the studio, having some fun with this concept and designing a geometric foreground that would act as an interesting support structure for the main idea.”
