Jill S. Krutick - Biography

Jill Krutick has been a full-time, contemporary abstract expressionist artist since 2010.  But already, Krutick she has been honored with six museum exhibitions on two continents, including four solo shows.

Krutick is a most unusual, even radical, artist in that she is equally analytical and creative. Before her fantasy career as a full-time artist, Krutick was a high-ranking media executive and a top-ranked equity analyst on Wall Street. Prior to leaving the corporate world and committing to her art practice full time, she was Fortune Magazine’s #1 Entertainment Analyst in 2001.

The energy, talent and perception that created success in the business world have refocused on mark making that is both rhapsodic and conversational, expressing her passion for the environment and visionary imagination.

Her most recent solo museum exhibition in 2023 featured a site-specific 85-foot long abstract artwork, “Coral Beliefs,” at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park & Museum, Ohio. The mixed media on panel work captured both the exquisite beauty and the unprecedented tribulations faced by coral reefs around the world today.

Coral reefs have become the language in which Krutick communicates not only as an artist but as an artist/gallerist entrepreneur. Krutick has expanded her artist network, global reach and artistic discovery by opening her studio space to hundreds of artists over the past few years. She has worked with MFA students, photographers, printers, painters, sculptors, watercolorists and eco-warriors. These efforts underscore the necessity for artists to come together to realize their own dreams. Very much like a coral reef, we are all interdependent on each other.

Krutick paints in her Westchester, New York studio/gallery with her Old English Sheepdogs, Rocket, Violet and Rocket’s son, Buzz.

Her work is in private and public collections as well as the permanent collections of several museums including the Coral Springs Museum of Art, in Coral Springs, Florida; Yellowstone Museum of Art, in Billings, Montana; The Longwood Center for the Visual Arts in Farmville, Virginia; and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Artist Statement

My paintings trace my joyful path of self-discovery and creative exploration. Using only texture, form, and color, I try to capture intense beauty and the constant flux of nature: galaxies, skies, blossoms, and tides. I combine abstract expressionist gestures, impressionist luminosity, and personal symbols of change on textured surfaces that contrast light and dark to achieve pictorial balance.

My early work centered on geometric patterns with linear up and down movements contrasted with the right to left movements of my palette knife, creating a tapestry-like effect of precision and depth.

My recent work explores the use of texture, form and color to examine the eco challenges facing the world. What began as an escape to peaceful, imaginary fantasy worlds, like my Dreamscape, Shangri La and Aurora Borealis series, has now become an art practice exploring the impact of climate change on our earth and sea.

Through my Contours of the Earth series, I examine post-apocalyptic imagined shapes of the world after the effects of climate change. This watercolor-based series imagines the impact of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and the drying of the land/sea through aridification. In December 2021, one of the aridification watercolors was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania's permanent art collection. Here is a short video which gives a glimpse into the creation of these watercolor works.

Video: Aridification

My eco practice has developed beyond the use of just watercolors to a complex interplay of watercolor, oil paint, and acrylic mediums, together with various paper collage and plastic materials. Through the use of new applications, drying techniques, and materials, I have uncovered practices that connect my materials to a philosophical spirit about protecting the environment. I have negotiated an "alliance" between my materials and the subject matter itself. My work has advanced from being merely illustrative to structurally aligning it to eco-based themes. The work is becoming more open, fluid, and reflective of the aqueous effects of water as well as the debris that clutters it.

These new techniques have given me the freedom to explore the world's largest organism and complementary biosphere, coral reefs. Coral bleaching and the growing pollution from plastics and other toxicants threaten our coral reefs. This fragile structure literally builds and maintains itself once all the correct conditions exist, but is in great peril worldwide largely because of global warming. Without coral reefs, fish die and the eco system unravels. Coral reefs have become the language in which I communicate as an artist. As a diver and self-proclaimed “eco warrior,” I see the world through a lens of underwater coral and sea life. The shapes, colors and movement are central to my work, and are designed to raise awareness about the threats to this natural wonder. 

I recently created a short process video about the creation of one of my largest works -- Coral Reef. This six panel, 6 x 12-foot piece (each panel 36 x 48 inches) is a multimedia painting on canvas that includes plastic, paper, watercolor, acrylic, oil paint, and a variety of additional acrylic media. This work showcases a combination of techniques that I am developing to capture abstract, natural, imaginative life forms in the ocean. See the video below…

Video: Creating the Coral Reef