Jill Anne Skelly
Artist Statement
The smell of pine and seashore brine. Sand in your shoes. Between your toes. Leaves crunching underfoot. Soft, soundless evergreen paths.
Light green lichen, Emerald moss. Burnt-orange fungi.
Cat-ice January. The return of light in March. Lady Slipper May. Hawks whistling. Red Maple, White Pine, Buckeye Brown. Honeysuckle June. Joe Pye July. Jingle Shell August.
What inspires me to create?
The smells, sounds, colors and textures of my Long Island home ignite my imagination. My paintings, drawings, prints and collages are directly connected to my daily hikes and runs, my attic memories, collections of childhood ephemera and past hobbies that weave their way into my work.
I invite you to slow down. Get outside. Look up. Smile. Listen. Give yourself the gift of time to experience and explore the place you live.
Artist Bio
Jill Skelly is a visual artist living and working on Long Island. She combines her love of the outdoors, as a trail runner, master gardener, Trail Sisters leader, and naturalist with her art practice. Drawing, painting, printmaking, mixed-media and collage, she uses and re-purposes her own work into new compositions and thrives on experimentation.
Her work has been shown locally at the Huntington Arts Council Gallery, the Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery at Huntington Art League, and the Mills Pond Gallery.
She has studied drawing and painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, received an MS in Art Education from CUNY Queens, a BS in Visual Arts from SUNY New Paltz and studied design and color at Parsons School of Design.
During her decades long career as a K-6 public art teacher she introduced the TAB teaching philosophy -a choice based program, piloted an Edible Schoolyard garden project that still continues, led the educators union in her district and continues to volunteer as a Suffolk County Master Gardener and as the local group leader for Trail Sisters, a national trail running organization.
Currently she is a 2026 recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts grant for her project Etched in the Parks. This new work explores Long Island’s state parks using solar plate etching technology, an alternative to traditional etching.
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