Jean is an artist and educator with a love of both science and art. 2012 marks her twenty-first year as a watercolor instructor for Fairfax County Public Schools' Adult and Community Education program, where she developed courses in color, landscape, and painting techniques for beginning, intermediate, and advanced adult learners. Jean encourages her students to experiment with water media, find and express their passion, and to enjoy the pursuit of individual style and personal growth.
Jean refers to her own work as representational rather than realistic. She stresses pattern and shape, and infuses her paintings with energy, celebration, or drama. She works mostly in primary and secondary colors and enjoys exaggerating contrasts, painting the negative space, and watching the watercolors flow. As her work evolved, she incorporated more abstraction, altered her use of edges, applied bolder color, and painted more vertically to capture the action of water and pigment running across the paper’s surface.
Jean has served on the Board of the Virginia Watercolor Society, as an officer of Potomac Valley Watercolorists, and as chapter president and coordinating council chair of the Delta Kappa Gamma International Honor Society of Professional Women Educators. She is a signature member of the American, National, Western Colorado, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Philadelphia, and Baltimore Watercolor Societies. Her work has been included in Flowers in Watercolor, The Best of Watercolor Painting Composition, Splash 5: Best of Watercolor The Glory of Color, The Artistic Touch 4, International Artist, American Artist, and Watercolor. In the National Watercolor Society’s 79th Annual Exhibition, her work won the Watercolor West Award and was selected for the NWS Travel Show Exhibition 2000. Her paintings have been accepted into over 100 juried shows including the 79th, 85th and 87th NWS annuals and in the AWS’s 134th, 137th and 139th Annual International Exhibitions. In 2004, she received the AWS Mario Cooper and Dale Meyers Medal, and her work toured in the AWS Annual Traveling Exhibition, 2004 - 05. In 2006, she was recognized in the 20th anniversary issue of Watercolor as one of 20 emerging artists. In 2008, she received the “Phil Dike Award” in the NWS All Member Show, and her students nominated her for the Virginia Governor's Award for the Arts.
*"A Splash of Color" ©Jean K. Gill From the Collection of A. Relene Schuster
* All images on this site are protected by U. S. Copyright laws. No image may be reproduced without the express, written permission of the artist, Jean K. Gill.
