Left and Right Brained
Krutick is a born and raised New Yorker who only became a full-time painter in 2011, and her progress has been spectacular.
An artistic child, she both painted and was a serious student of piano. She had initially considered becoming a professional pianist, before deciding that it was too solitary an undertaking.
She looked upon her visual pursuits as a private passion; she always painted but didn’t display. She says, “I was extremely driven as a child to be independent.”
She’s a most unusual artist in that she is equally left-brained and right-brained.
Along with her artistic pursuits, she also loved numbers and was interested in business and graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Finance. Her bifurcated brain, though, initially led her to the business end of the music industry, prior to success after success on Wall Street.
Left and Right Brained
Krutick is a born and raised New Yorker who only became a full-time painter in 2011, and her progress has been spectacular.
An artistic child, she both painted and was a serious student of piano. She had initially considered becoming a professional pianist, before deciding that it was too solitary an undertaking.
She looked upon her visual pursuits as a private passion; she always painted but didn’t display. She says, “I was extremely driven as a child to be independent.”
She’s a most unusual artist in that she is equally left-brained and right-brained.
Along with her artistic pursuits, she also loved numbers and was interested in business and graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Finance. Her bifurcated brain, though, initially led her to the business end of the music industry, prior to success after success on Wall Street.
She remembers, “I needed a very stimulating environment. I spent 17 years there.”
Entertainment and leisure businesses became her professional forte.
She helped take various resorts public. She was named Fortune Magazine’s #1 entertainment analysis and Institutional Investor ranked her in both entertainment and leisure, ranking Jill Krutick at the very top in leisure, which includes cruise companies and toy companies.
She notes, “You had to understand the nuances of all these different companies, of which there were many.”
While this was both a very amusing area of business and a very demanding one, Jill Krutick continued to paint, taking courses at New York’s famed Art Students League.
Dimples lighting up her face, she laughs, saying, “Something was bursting to get out.”
She adds, “The art became sort of a recovery place because Wall Street was an insanely intense environment. When I started painting at night, it became a release.”
She moved to a position at Warner Music, a position that offered more free time to spend with her attorney husband, Robert Berg, and their children. And her art.
She says, “The job became more manageable. It was at that point a corporate job rather than Wall Street. It became a place to disappear. I think that’s why I have always painted with such beautiful colors. I just want to be in that happy place. That was my therapy and it grew into something obviously much more significant. I knew I had all of that bursting inside of me and I knew I saw the world through a creative eye, that I was attracted to different colors, shapes, and images.”
And her painting became freer and freer. “I won’t paint in a style where it is confining, where it is constricting. It’s all very instinctive with natural movements.”
But she didn’t think art would become a new career, not until someone at a company called Partners International saw her work and asked if she could hang some pieces in their offices.
Soon, various executives were purchasing Jill Krutick’s paintings right off the office walls. She says, “That is when I got the bug to maybe pursue this full-time.”
Since 2011, she has had more than a dozen solo shows and participated in numerous group shows. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, including The Coral Springs Museum in Florida, which held a major solo exhibition of her paintings.
Jill Krutick’s art is now on display internationally; several of her paintings were shown in Mallorca (Majorca), Spain, at the Museu de Porreres.
Her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has added a Krutick to its permanent collection.
I have been following her unique career for a few years. I was first entranced by her paintings when I saw them at Manolis Projects in Miami, which is an enormous studio/gallery run by another talented abstract painter and former banker, J. Steven Manolis.
I later met Jill and experienced a striking group show at the Georges Berges Gallery in New York’s SoHo, The Feminine Sublime, an exhibit that featured several contemporary women abstract painters. One of Krutick’s pieces was the one most apparent to passersby, the gallery’s catnip, the one closest to the storefront window.
![18x24_D_Petals1_2017_Krutick_Acrylic H_[F] web.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5956afafc534a5d681494fbf/1727386060624-Z3E4NGYWY3MX1XCAZMSS/18x24_D_Petals1_2017_Krutick_Acrylic+H_%5BF%5D+web.jpg)
![18x24_R_BrookTrout_2019_Krutick_Oil_[F] web.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5956afafc534a5d681494fbf/1727386061846-Y567DUAGK2LFBCSJLHO0/18x24_R_BrookTrout_2019_Krutick_Oil_%5BF%5D+web.jpg)
