Look at long-ago portraits of kings and queens, business moguls, heads of state, people of literary and theatrical significance, cherished children and endless heroes of mythology and religion. We learn about costumes of the day, social habits and hierarchies. We can learn a lot but do we learn about the soul of the subject? We can today and right here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Marin County has a new take on portraits in the person of Jill Culver, who always had the feeling she could paint but did not take it seriously as a career until recently. Good news when all was said and done. She was laid off from her long-held corporate position. With the time and still strong urge to paint, Jill began doing soul-portraits. And if that sounds unusual, it is. She woke up one morning with a vision of a woman’s face surrounded by feathers, now her signature painting in her every-growing body of work. She was exhausted by the work of this first portrait, and when she saw what was on the canvas, she said, “Oh, I hope you are friendly,” and she became a willing captive of her own singular ability.
She prefers not to know too much about her clients and lets her intuitive work speak for itself. She sees more than the physical. As practical, skeptical, grounded and sane she is, she was concerned that people might see her as a little “woo-woo”. But, she surrendered to her own abilities and forged ahead with paintings of people with details she was never told, a desert background for a woman who was married at Burning Man, a ringed collar on a man who had been a priest but never mentioned it, a woman with a lace handkerchief who, as it turns out, has a loved collection of her Italian grandmother’s handkerchiefs. The astounding list goes on, and rather than continue myself, please, do yourself a favor of listening to Jill tell her own astounding and mystifying story.
She knows how to get out of her own way and not let her ego stop her in conjuring up details of a client. She has given herself over to a natural ability not only to paint, but to see souls so clearly. She has never taken a painting class and does not know how she is able to do these portraits. Jill has an open studio the first Sunday of every month so you can see her work and answer questions you may well have.
For years she has been asked if she does portraits of pets, and her answer was always “no” because she simply had no feeling for it. However, about two and a half year ago she was sitting at a café and saw a bird fly up, and, believe it or not, she saw it with Mickey-Mouse ears. She laughingly said to herself, “Okay, here we go.” Now you can commission Jill to do pet portraits.
Sometimes people fear she is reading their minds. She does not consider herself psychic. She does not get premonitions or intuit information about people when she meets them. But she does have a meditative process that gives her the information she needs for her work. She was able to paint one portrait of a woman who lives in England, someone she has never met, and did the portrait from her picture on Skype.
I invite you to hear this astounding woman’s story and love letter to herself, a letter that is an important documentation of her own history and artistic growth and, at the same time, such an unpretentious straightforward touching work. A letter that reflects just the woman Jill Culver is.
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