By Jonathan Burger, Craven Arts Council & Gallery, Inc.
Based in North Carolina, Jill Eberle is a figurative painter who tells stories about the results of human interactions – the consequences we encounter by trying to balance our autonomy with our relationships. Her narratives are pulled like threads from myths, headlines, observations, and experiences, then woven together to suggest tales of power, control, privilege, alienation, loyalty, and perseverance – those experiences that our mark souls and govern our behavior. Craven Arts Council’s Gallery Director, Jonathan Burger, interviewed Jill Eberle about her career and journey as an artist recently.
Where are you from and what’s your background as an artist? Have you had any jobs outside of the field of art that taught you something you incorporated into your artistic practice?
My first encounter with “serious” art came when I was twelve. Picture this: I was sitting on the stool atop a platform, trying not to fidget with the plastic apple in my hands. A dozen artists stood around me, intently working at their easels. The middle-aged instructor was a revered artist from New York City who spentsummers teaching in Connecticut. I was the model.
I held the same pose for two weeks, three hours a day. On breaks, I’d walk around and admire the student’s portraits. One day I paused at a piece painted by a kindly woman. I liked the way she made me look. Later, when I was back on the stool, the teacher loudly critiqued her work. “We are not here to paint pretty pictures!” he bellowed. “We paint the truth. She is not that pretty!” I cringed. To another student he said, “Look how you have handled her chin! No! She has a very weak chin.”
These are things no budding teenager wants to hear, yet I nevertheless loved being in the studio. Something felt intangibly right about that place and I returned every summer until I turned sixteen and was old enough for a ‘real’ job.
It was a long, circuitous route back to the comfort of a studio. After graduating college with a BFA in scene design for theatre, I headed to New York City where I held a host of jobs – scene painter, prop builder, assistant designer, architectural draftsman, technical illustrator, sign language interpreter, counselor, and sailmaker. Whenever there was a need for something to be drawn or painted, I eagerly volunteered. Then life took another turn. I met a guy, hopped on a sailboat, and headed to the Caribbean where we lived aboard for six years.
By the time we sailed back to the United States with an infant daughter in tow, I had begun painting. My skills in drafting and theatre design helped a bit, but I had only a smattering of fine art training. I applied to the MFA program at East Carolina University and was surprised when they accepted me. There, I was finally reunited with the oil paints and art studios of my youth.
We’re both ECU alums, and you continued to teach at East Carolina University after you graduated. Is there anything that being a professor taught you about art or the creative process? I know you use a lot of figures and portraits in your work, has that always been the case, and what got you started with that?
By my second semester of grad school, I was teaching freshman courses. I loved working with college students. For fifteen years I taught drawing, painting, and illustration, and spent a couple of semesters working in Italy. Teaching was my real education. I’d decide there was something I wanted to learn, I’d fiddle with it, research it to death, practice it myself, then share it with my students.
For example, while in grad school I painted many still lifes which included dolls, toys, puppets, or clothing arranged in staged scenarios. It became obvious these items were substitutes for the human scenes I really wanted to portray, so I cautiously began creating figurative compositions. A few years later when I wanted to increase my knowledge of the human form, I told the school that I would teach a class in artistic anatomy, but… in two years. I bought every book on the subject and spent the next 24 months traveling to multiple
classes and taking private lessons with the best teachers I could find. My anatomy course involved making an anatomical model. I taught it ten times and each semester I did the project along with my students.
On the topic of your work, you have a really unique process. Could you talk a little bit about it and how you discovered the process? Is there a central theme to your work, or does it change from piece to piece or series to series?
A few years ago, I did some drawings I rather liked. But they were on cheap newsprint paper and would eventually disintegrate. To preserve them I began experimenting with an image transfer process I’d learned in school. It’s complicated to explain, but the technique allows me to imbed the drawing into a transparent sheet and remove the paper from it. Then I can add color behind the drawing or on top of it with a variety of media. I can even make multiple images and layer them together onto the aluminum panels I use to mount them.
I spent a couple of years developing and working exclusively in this process but recently went back to painting as well. My work comes from gut feelings, personal experiences, readings, observing others, even myths. I think we all try to find an equilibrium between our autonomy and our connections to others. How do we maintain our individuality while also being part of a relationship, group, or community? That balance brings up issues of power, control, devotion, and loyalty – love and fear. Basically, I’m asking, “How can we live together with equanimity? And what trips us up?” That’s the thread that runs through my work.
Is there another artist in your field or another field of art that inspires you?
When I find an artist who inspires me, be it classical or contemporary, I download images of their work so I can study and refer back to them. I just checked and I have files on over 150 different artists! But when I think of paintings that moved me most deeply, it always comes back to viewing them in person. Memories seared in my mind include seeing Rembrandt’s late portraits, Picasso’s Guernica, Antonio Lopez Garcia’s cityscapes, and the giant figurative works of Tintoretto. These all have a magnitude of feeling and creative force that’s dumbfounding.
You’ve won a lot of awards and been a number of prestigious galleries and exhibitions over the years. Is there one that sticks out to you, and why?
It’s both exciting and humbling to win an award you’ve respected for years. The Lore Degenstein Gallery in Pennsylvania does an annual show which isn’t widely known because it’s solely for figurative painters, but it attracts an impressive list of participants. I was so pleased to be accepted last year, but also stunned that I won it.
Do you have any advice for other artists pursuing their work or a career as an artist?
Here’s something I used to tell my students. Picture a graph. Along the bottom, the horizontal axis is the time you spend working on your art, and the vertical axis is your ability. The graph shows a line which represents your skills. It starts low, rises, then levels off, rises again, levels off again, etc. This shows that your skills improve, they plateau for a while, then improve more. That’s pretty obvious.
But there is another line on the graph which represents your conceptual understanding. It also improves and plateaus – but here’s the trick – it doesn’t follow the same track as your skills. In fact, it rises and plateaus almost opposite to your skills.
So, while your skills are advancing, your understanding is static. That’s when you say “Wow, I can’t believe I just painted that! I’m awesome!” Then your understanding and perception improve. You see more. You’re more discerning. Suddenly, your skill level doesn’t look so good. You’re tempted to say, “Ugh, it’s terrible! I’m no good at this!”
And this cycle is continuous. As long as you are working and challenging yourself, you will likely go through this over and over – “That’s so good!” “That’s so awful!”. The key is to recognize that when your work looks great, enjoy it. But when it appears lousy to you, it indicates growth and improved understanding. Give yourself a pat on the back and keep going.
I know a piece of yours has been accepted to the 2020 Bank of the Arts National Juried Exhibition, but where else can people find your work?
I’m delighted to be in the show. You can find my work at my website – jilleberle.com. There, you can also see upcoming events or sign up for a newsletter that will give preview peeks at what I’m working on.