Jackie Lakely
STATEMENT
I am inspired by everything around me and what’s going on in my life, and in particular nature’s lines, colors, beauty, rawness and enormity, the night sky, the sea, boats, landscape, language, stories, poetry, music, and folklore.
In my work I often aim to capture a fleeting moment and tell a story. I also like to combine realistic studies with narrative and more abstract elements. Usually I am inspired directly by something as a launching point and then the piece takes on a life of it’s own.
BIO
Jackie has been teaching mixed media and watercolor classes and workshops at OPAL for the past seven years. She has shown her artwork at group and solo exhibitions in Oak Park, Chicago and Evanston, including the Oak Park Public Library, ARC, Gather, and Fortunate Discoveries. She also does commissioned illustration work, most recently a series of collage illustrations for a children’s book.
She has a degree in History and Studio Art from University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia, and she did graduate study in painting and art education at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
Her artwork is often centered around narrative but she does plein air and figurative work as well. She was a realistic painter at the start of her career in the early 1990’s, but evolved into more abstraction and lyrical, narrative work over the next couple of decades, with primary inspirations coming from nature, a lifelong love of landscape, and a sense of place. In 2016 she spent a month long residency living in a lighthouse in the Shetland Isles, and she’s always looking forward to new adventure and discovery.