Article written by Elizabeth Sobieski for Medium (an online publication)
It’s just a half-hour north by train from New York’s Grand Central Station to Jill Krutick’s Mamaroneck studio, a spacious and tranquil light-filled world chockablock with color; color that tantalizes a viewer from all directions, color extruding from a myriad of arresting canvases.
There is also something in shades of gray, large and looming, lumbering about the space.
Krutick’s affable sheepdog, Rocket, serves as a sort of studio assistant - well not exactly - but he’s joyful company, and he somehow manages to not be bathed in oil and acrylic and to never damage those lyrical and luminous paintings emerging from his master’s talented hand and eye and heart.
Jill Krutick is an abstract expressionist painter. Full of enthusiasm, she shows me just honed canvases she has created for her shows at the esteemed National Arts Club (through May 29) and Art Gotham (July 1 to August 30), both in Manhattan, and for the Hamptons Fine Art Fair (July 11–14) in Southampton.
They are vibrant and multi-hued and breathtakingly beautiful, striking as both paintings and collages.
A creamy-skinned, dimpled redhead, Krutick laughs readily. Over the years, she has envisioned seven series that she continuously returns to; some are abstract landscapes, some are called Swirls, and others, for overt reasons, their square shapes within the bounds of the canvas, are referenced as Ice Cubes.
Ice Cube Montana Sapphires, 2019, 60 x 60, oil on canvas, Courtesy of Jill Krutick
Some of her paintings are deeply textured through the incorporation of molding paste. Many of her works have captured what she has experienced during her family’s usually ecologically-oriented travels, paintings that indirectly address the vanishing Great Barrier Reef, the splendid purity of Antarctica, the wildlife of the Galapagos, and a recent experience peering down the world’s largest waterfall, Victoria Falls in Africa.
I spot some watercolors. Jill Krutick calls these Contours of Earth and they depict a dystopic view of the world; climate change melting ice caps as sea levels rise and the earth heats up and dries.
Recent museum exhibits have been at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Yellowstone Museum of Art, and The Longwood Center for the Visual Arts.
Her latest museum exhibition at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park & Museum, Ohio, featured a site-specific 85-foot long abstract artwork, Coral Beliefs, a mixed media on panel work that captures both the exquisite beauty and the unprecedented tribulations faced by coral reefs around the world today.
Children’s books that she once read to Zoe and Wylie, now 28 and 25, a newly minted attorney and a professional fisherman, have served as another inspiration.
The artist says, “Sometimes you start out with one idea and it becomes something completely different. With an abstract landscape, I know the general elements but sometimes it turns into a different painting, a mystery.”
When she was focused on a show at the Yellowstone Museum, Jill Krutick’s visits to Montana encouraged her to capture the color and energy of that spectacular state, its mountains skies, and wildlife. The shimmering skin of local trout.
She holds up two Montana sapphires, small stones in blue and orange tones, colors that had been incorporated into her palate.
Rainbow Trout, Brown Trout, Brook Trout and Cutthroat Trout, (pictured top to bottom) each 20 x 60 inches, oil on canvas. All four are part of the permanent collection of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Pictured at Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana, Courtesy of Jill Krutick
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.
Jill Krutick at Georges Berges Gallery, NYC next to Shangri La 4, 108 x 48 inches, acrylic on canvas and Elektra, 60 x 48 inches, oil on canvas (right), Courtesy of Jill Krutick
I asked how she was chosen for that show and she said the renowned art critic, Donald Kuspit, who was curating the exhibit, had contacted her by email. She was very pleased to be part of this group of emerging female abstract artists. She says, “It is wonderful to see a shift and the opportunity to showcase work with fellow artists, and other people from the community.”
The Rise of Painting
Iceberg Castle, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, on display at New York’s National Arts Club, through May 29, 2024, Courtesy of Jill Krutick
There is a renaissance, a revived appreciation for abstract painting now. For a number of years, top tier museums and blue chip galleries have been flooded with installations, conceptual art and photography, painting being relegated to an also ran.
But despite rumors to the contrary, and its displacement at a number of MFA programs, painting has never been dead and has instead reemerged triumphant.
Recent Whitney Biennials have abounded with paintings. The Armory Show and the Art Dealers Association of America fairs, as well as Art Basel and the Frieze Art Fairs in both Los Angeles and New York, featuring only the most esteemed international contemporary galleries, have been showing far more paintings than anything else.
Sarah Sze, the United States representative at the 2013 Venice Biennale and a MacArthur Fellow, celebrated for her installations and sculptures, is suddenly making and exhibiting abstract paintings.
And the legendary figurative painter and portraitist, the nonagenarian Alex Katz, displayed new work at his 2023 Guggenheim retrospective that appeared completely abstract, without a single canine or human, not even his familiar red-lipsticked wife Ada.
Jill Krutick’s abstract expressionist artwork couldn’t be more current.
Before visiting Jill Krutick’s studio, I jotted down which artists I considered her painterly forebears. In my notes I had written, “Monet, DeKooning, Richter, and Rothko.”
I asked her to name her favorite artists and she listed the very same ones, with the additions of Van Gogh and Chagall. I showed her my notes and she seemed surprised. But while her painterly ancestry may be apparent, her paintings are stylistically unique to her.
Jill Krutick employs some time-honored techniques and materials, like brushes and palate knives, but takes advantage of such means of applying paint as squeegies, turkey basters, and various sized beaters.
She admits that some of her work comes readily, whereas other pieces are a struggle, taking months or even years to paint before she feels they are fully evolved, ready to emerge from the studio.
She states that, “Many paintings are paintings over paintings over paintings.” She points to one luminescent piece called Stairway to Heaven, which she had originally started years ago and only recently completed to her satisfaction. She adds, “Some are easy and some are pain and torture.” But the torture and pain are not apparent to a beholder, only the incandescent beauty.
Looking around the sunny studio at her canvases, Jill Krutick says, ”Everything gets named after the painting is done, as to what it means to me. Like the Phoenix was a very autobiographical painting that showed me going through the gauntlet and rising from the ashes of Wall Street to the world of art. It became the right name for that painting. Each painting to me always tells a story and that’s when I know a painting is complete, when I actually have crystallized whatever I am trying to accomplish.”
She firmly believes, “It is the thing you have to get through to arrive at the freedom.”
Jill Krutick’s Mamaroneck, NY art studio/gallery, Courtesy of Jill Krutick