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Jill Poyerd: Portrait of a Landscape Artist
Jill Poyerd: Portrait of a Landscape Artist
By Joe Motheral
iving in the Leesburg area, artist Jill Poyerd has a wealth of gorgeous scenery to inspire her painting of local landscapes.
She once focused mainly on doing portraits, but over the last ten years, “I kind of got burned out with them.” These days, she mostly concentrates on landscapes as an art style she calls Contemporary Realism. Her work has been displayed in the Art of the Piedmont auction in Middleburg for the past six years.
Her landscapes depict scenes with combinations of open fields bordered by trees, with water, barns, fauna and flowers. Viewing her work often evokes the sensation of driving in rural areas or taking walks through the countryside in Loudoun County.
Jill starts out by photographing a particular scene, and “then I make a sketch with just the outlines. Then I transfer that to tracing paper and put that on the paper (that she’ll paint on), and I retrace it with whatever lines I want. If I don’t like it, I just put it on a new piece of paper.”
Jill admitted it can be a difficult process but, “You do all that planning and your chance of success is so much higher.” She puts grid lines in addition to the outlines of the main parts of the upcoming painting. “I use it to ensure proportions/dimensions right in the sketch. They’re loose reference points.”
All that is merely a prelude to her actually painting. Once the sketch is on the paper to her satisfaction, she fills it in with oils or water colors.
Another offshoot of her artistic style is something called “monochromatic.” These are outlines of sketches using one dark color. “I tend to like natural colors,” she said. “I sometimes like monochromatic. With monochromatic, you can visually read.”
How does she decide what to paint?
“For me it’s usually the beauty and balance seen in nature or the desire to capture the moment in time,” she said, adding that her own favorite artists are William Bougeureali and John Singer Sergeant, who also painted many memorable portraits
Jill’s routine involves going once a week to the Gallery on Loudoun Street in Leesburg along with her artist friend Libby.
“It takes me about two months to complete a painting,” she said, giving plenty of credit to Libby because “we encourage each other.”
She described herself as “an artist who can’t just paint anything. I don’t enjoy taking commissions because I find that I don’t have the passion for the painting.”
Jill also teaches art online, with videos on YouTube with 75,000 followers. In those instructional videos, she describes the process for selecting a subject, with visual and vocal aids and following through with the steps leading up to a completed painting. They can be viewed at www.jillpoyerd.com
