Personal Nostalgia: A Portfolio by Jill McGillivray
Jill McGillivray is an artist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In her practice, Jill creates paintings that explore moments of personal nostalgia, expressing these moments in a style that walks upon the tension between abstraction and figurative renderings.
Christina, oil and acrylic on canvas
I’m quite enjoying Jill’s recent paintings of outdoor scenes and multiple figures. The artist’s painting style does an excellent job of capturing the slight uncertainty of form, and off-kilter color palette of an old or double-exposed photograph. It’s interesting to see the way the artist varies the level of abstraction from painting to painting – in some cases, the representational figures are almost indiscernible, while in others, figures come to the forefront, with abstraction serving simply to blur the edges or erase details like faces.
Technically, the paintings are beautifully gestural but seem built on a foundation of representational skill – Jill understands the rules of painting, and seems to draw a great deal of enjoyment, and fascination, from bending and breaking them.
