ABOUT
Jill Fitzmaurice lives in Napier, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand.
After a teaching and educational software design background spanning four decades, Jill established herself as an artist about 15 years ago.
She has explored such mediums as oil, acrylic, encaustic, wax, pastel, charcoal and photography, with a preference for oil and acrylic.
In her early days, Jill majored in Art at Palmerston Teachers’ College and was fortunate to have as tutors well-known New Zealand artists Paul Dibble, Cliff Whiting, John Taiapa, Frank Davis and Ray Thorburn.
New Zealand landforms, the ocean, the sky and the myriad of greens provide the inspiration for much of Jill’s expressionist and abstract artwork.
Portraiture also features in her painting and she has spent the last four years perfecting an Old Masters’ technique using a limited palette composed of vermillion, yellow ochre, white and carbon black.
Always eager to expand her research into different aspects of painting, Jill has attended a variety of workshops with a focus on oils, cold wax, abstracts and life drawing.
Jill’s approach to painting is multi-faceted. Her preferred medium is oils, but at present acrylics allow her the best way to explore different methods in search of her “voice” as a painter. Her aim is to represent a 3-D world onto a painted surface. To achieve this she plays with colour, form and texture. The resulting stylised landscapes, mixed media works, hyper-realistic, surrealist paintings and portraits all jostle for space in her studio.
Credit: The Fitzmaurice Women's Biographers and Copywriters Guild. Dec 2021.