Jackie Lakely

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.