ABOUT JACLYN
Remagine reality with Jaclyn’s world full of voluptuous blooms, intricate botanicals and imaginative landscapes. There is joy in the confident, bold brush strokes superimposed on colourful stains that build the many layers of colours and create her energy-filled works.
ACRYLIC PAINTER
ILLUSTRATOR
SURFACE DESIGNER
PAINTER
Jaclyn loves to explore and acrylic as a medium is perfect for her ever-evolving method of painting. Colourful stains create the energy-filled works of Jaclyn. She entwines layers of bright colour with gentle variations of grey that lead your eye around her paintings. There is much to see with her paintings, but it’s also about how you feel while you explore. Jaclyn wants you to experience the happiness she experiences, within the colours and brush strokes.
✓ bouquets
✓ landscapes
✓ abstracts
Jaclyn is a colourist who has developed her own unique method of using a limited split-primary palette from which she creates what she calls a ‘sliding-scale’ primary palette. This approach gives harmony not only within a piece, but across all her paintings.
Within Jaclyn’s daily painting practice, colour is key as she experiments with colour mixing and strategic placement of contrast in both colour and shape to give her works their depth and feeling of harmony.
Music plays a key role in every painting session. Jaclyn will start the day with an “inspiration song” that drives the emotions that works into each painting, Then continuing with a similar playlist, her head bobs, shoulders shift, hips swing and singing (off-key) Jaclyn translates this energy into the colours, the brush work, and the concepts developed on the canvas
“A great painting session, with music that allows my creativity to just float along, leaves me in a creative high for the rest of the day,” Jaclyn says.
FUN FACT – The garden painting above, Paisley, is featured in an art magazine published in June 2025.
DIGITAL ARTIST
Jaclyn is an accomplished illustrator, having started drawing with ink as a child. With a graphic design background and Adobe Creative Suite in her tool belt, it was natural for Jaclyn to delve into digital art with her Apple pencil and the app, Procreate.
✓ DIGITAL ART
✓ ILLUSTRATION
✓ SURFACE DESIGN
“Seeing a design I have created off my iPad and onto a tangible product never fails to thrill me.”
For Jaclyn it started with illustrations, shifted into complicated multi-layered digital paintings and then, as she is a self-confessed fabric hoarder, surface pattern design was a natural transition. Jaclyn has had her designs used on wall blocks, fabric, blankets and mugs. Now Jaclyn also uses Procreate and Adobe Illustrator to manipulate her painted art for prints and other surface applications.
FUN FACT – The leaf image above was accepted into and exhibited in a juried show in early 2025.
COLLABORATIONS: Contact Jaclyn to discuss your collaboration ideas.
Lifelong Creative
As a lifelong creative working with media from fabric to metal clay, using skills from graphic design to rug hooking, Jaclyn has spent her life learning the skill of art in all its forms.
With a daily practice in digital art on her iPad, Jaclyn feels it natural that she would want to learn to paint with a real brush and paints. She chose to learn to work with acrylics as her medium of choice.
“The more I learned, the more I realized that I needed to learn. Some days (still) it’s a daunting task to take the skill of painting and make it mine.” says Jaclyn of her studies.
While her current work hurdles the line between realism and imagination, Jaclyn’s art studies have been mainly focused on impressionistic representative art. When asked about the abundance of flowers, Jaclyn says,
“I have no idea where all these florals have come from – I suppose from the music. I honestly thought my direction would be landscape painting. But left to my own imagination and with music bouncing around my head, flowers are what have escaped this crazy brain of mine.”
FUN FACT – In 2024, Jaclyn painted for over 34,000 minutes, listening to Spotify.
Studies
Jaclyn began acrylic painting in early 2022. While she is what most would call a self-taught artist, Jaclyn feels that this is a misnomer as in reality for two years she spent countless hours each week dedicated to learning the foundations of art principles from professional artists in Canada and the United States (to whom she owes a debt of thanks). Jaclyn studied with Nancy Medina, an oil and acrylic painter who specializes in impressionistic florals. Through Acrylic University, her studies were mainly focused on landscape painting under impressionist artists Jed Dorsey and Dianna Shyne, as well as monthly guest artists such as Jennifer Bowman and Angela Bandurka. Jaclyn was introduced to portraiture with bold brush marking and colour through Bold School and its founder, Charla Maarschalk. With Noémie Côté, she studied open impressionism. Long fascinated with abstraction, Jaclyn also studied creating abstraction using mediums with Deniz Altug and it is this particular skill development that forms the basis of Jaclyn’s layer building.
If influenced by any artists, Jaclyn says she aspires to create as fearlessly as contemporary artists Julia Veenstra, Wyanne Thompson, Peter Batchelder, Paul Evans and Adam Young. These artists specialize in paintings with a distinctive voice and bold use of colour.
Jaclyn works from her studio in Wallace, Nova Scotia, a tiny village on the shores of the Northumberland Strait. She has affectionately named her studio Fox Meadow Studio, in honour of the foxes that play each summer in the field outside her studio window.