Jill Pearson Crafts Inventive Art From Her Downingtown Home

Like almost everyone else during the pandemic, Jill Pearson was bored of staring at a screen. A professional illustrator with a fine arts degree from the University of the Arts, she created freelance works via Photoshop for her job from her home in Downingtown, but she wanted more.

Freelance Photoshop Illustrator wasn’t the glamorous life Pearson had dreamt of, but it paid the bills until her kids came along. In 2021, she began painting again like she did in her youth. She didn’t intend to win any awards or sell the great American masterpiece, but in 2024, she took first place in the mixed media category at Lititz Outdoor Fine Art Show near Lancaster.

Pearson’s Photoshop background lends her a unique vision of the modern artistic landscape. Though media and technological literacy is higher today than ever before, most classically trained artists don’t have as in-depth a background in digital art as Pearson.

Her process for creating mixed-media art involves acrylic paint, drawing media and collages made from found paper, books, palette paper and more. It’s a style almost entirely unique to Pearson, somewhere between abstract and landscape that tugs at a certain cord in a viewer’s brain, giving off a sense of familiarity in the unknown.

“I start off completely intuitively and I build layers and I remove layers,” Pearson explains. “I’ll use an orbital sander and sand through stuff to make textures. It really goes back and forth and back and forth and I work out the composition on the canvas rather than start with the sketch.”

There’s an old adage about how there are two types of creatives: architects and gardeners. Architects plan out everything beforehand, like blueprints for building a house. Gardeners, meanwhile, let their work develop organically as if tending to a plant. A gardener might know they’ve planted a petunia, but they don’t know just how high it will grow or how many seeds it will sprout. No artist falls purely into any one category, but if Pearson were to be defined, she’d end up much more neatly as a gardener.

“I find abstract art to be more challenging because you’re not starting with an idea, you’re not following a sketch,” she continues. “I will say as I near the end of the painting, I kind of edit the work. I use my design skills to edit the composition and to show what I want to show. It’s kind of a journey…the whole process of creating the painting. I want the whole history of it to be there on the canvas.”

It’s that technique that Pearson used to have her art sold at places like Wayne Art Center, Historic Yellow Springs, the Malvern Retreat House Art Show and, most recently, the rather competitive Lititz Fine Arts Show. She’d been planning for Lititz as far back as winter 2023 when she submitted a booth shot to the fair’s organizers, though it took until May for them to confirm her place at the competition.

Thus July 27 found Pearson at Lititz Spring Park beneath her white tent, surrounded by her latest works up for display. When the person across the aisle from her received his award for the drawing discipline, Pearson wrote herself off as the organizers walked away from her booth and the fair began to die down.

So when someone approached her booth with a blue ribbon, it came as a complete shock. Pearson was ecstatic.

Winning an award as an artist isn’t just a source of pride but a badge of legitimacy. It signifies that others have recognized her worth, making it easier to display and sell her own art, as well as attend higher-profile exhibitions.

“I’m hoping to use this to branch out to some better galleries in the area. It’s really only been three years since I started painting again, so I think I have a lot more up my sleeve in terms of what I want to accomplish,” Pearson says. “I also would like to start applying to some better art fairs. One of them probably next year I would apply to is Long’s Park Art Festival in Lancaster, which is a very, very high-end art fair. I’m hoping that winning this award will help with those things.”

Winning that ribbon at Lititz was a crowning moment for Pearson, but she doesn’t intend for it to be the crowning moment of her artistic pursuit. Suddenly doors are open for her that once were closed. With a newfound source of validity at her disposal, Pearson is primed to take the region by storm and become the artist she always wanted to be.

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