Jill is an independent Fine Art professional.
Born in London in 1959, Jill’s initial artistic inspiration was her father Arthur Banks (1927 – 1998). A military cartographer, Arthur was also the author of several acclaimed military atlases and collaborator on many books with the historian and biographer of Churchill; Sir Martin Gilbert. Arthur had his own studio annexed to the family home in Surrey and Jill fondly remembers spending many hours sitting opposite him on a high stool watching him work.
After defining painting as her vocation in London (1986 – 1988) under the tuition of Harry Robertson, Ged Wensley and Julie Stanley (née Kay) , Jill went on to concentrate solely on painting and life drawing in the Netherlands at the Academie Minerva, Groningen (1988 – 1992) whose alumni includes Jozef Israels and Henk Helmantel.
It was here that her love of oil paint and portraiture surfaced. However, ever curious and experimental, she actually graduated with large purely abstract work, mainly inspired by modern classical music.
After graduating in 1992, Jill remained in Groningen, working and exhibiting throughout the Netherlands until meeting her future partner the English fiddler Dave Swarbrick in 1998. Jill had been a fan of “Swarb” and his fiddle playing with folk-rock supergroup Fairport Convention for some time, often weaving his music into her work in a visual response.
Jill repatriated to England in 1998 and the couple married the following year.
Unfortunately, Dave’s health deteriorated due to emphysema and of course, this impacted on Jill’s artistic output and exhibiting opportunities as well as Dave’s career. The attic had been converted into a studio and she continued to paint in between caring for her husband. Dave was in fact so sick , The Daily Telegraph erroneously printed his obituary in 1999 after he had been taken critically ill on a tour of Austria that spring! Luckily, he survived and in 2004 he received a bilateral lung transplant from The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham. This had the phenomenal effect of liberating them both back intensively into their vocations.
Jill’s painting is now mature and technically proficient.
She concentrates on Portraiture (her first love and perhaps defining genre) but rings the changes with producing paintings (and drawings) which can be totally abstract through to genre (scenes of everyday life), figurative, semi-figurative, architectural and landscape. She also draws and produces giclée prints of many of her works. She is at home in any discipline as a professional painter would be expected to be in times gone by.