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.

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.