Artist Biography

Jill Hooper

Painter Jill Hooper is from North Carolina and New York, where she was born in 1970. Hooper showed a fondness for drawing and draftsmanship at a young age. She worked under D. Jeffrey Mims for an extended period in North Carolina as well as in Florence, Italy, studying still life, portraiture, and the figure. She also studied at Universite de Haute Bretagne in Rennes, France where she learned printmaking. Hooper studied portraiture with a focus on the sight-size traditions with Charles Cecil in Florence. In 2006, she participated in the apprentice program under Benjamin Long VI at the League of the Carolinas, as well as assisted him with the Crossnore fresco in mountains of North Carolina.

Hooper’s exposure to classical realism and to the academic figurative style transformed her work and persona. As her training became her own singular task, she traveled to the deserts of Utah and the museums of London and Vienna, drawing and painting from life and Old Master examples.

Hooper’s work has exhibited in France, England, and throughout the southeastern United States. She is permanently collected in three museums, including the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston where she is the youngest living artist to ever be collected. Her work can also be found in numerous private collections. In 2007, her self portrait Pugnis et Calcibus was on the BP portrait exhibit touring though the United Kingdom and hung in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Hooper will present a show of new work at the Greenville County Museum of Art in 2010. She lives and works in downtown Charleston, where her portraits and still-life compositions have earned her a reputation of quiet acclaim.