Photo by Kim Ashford

November 2011. The evolution of light through an artist’s eye.

Imagine a world where light ceased to exist. How would water appear? Once disturbed there would be no lines, no wrinkles or ripples. Without light, there would be no silken surface to break, no layer upon layer of disfigured reflections.

A world unimaginable for artist Jill Hackney. As she sits on the one chair in her Baton Rouge home studio, hugging one knee folded up against her chest, the multicolored paint strokes on her converse sneakers pop from beneath her chocolate corduroys. “The light is honest. It’s not contrived,” she said.

It streams in through windows of a cathedral ceiling that stretches almost thirty feet high, illuminating her workspace—a completely open home studio space, punctuated by a brown leather sofa, brick fireplace and easels that line the room. Behind her, a ten-by-seven-foot waterscape occupies an entire wall. It’s an oil-on-canvas painting she’s been working on for several days.

Artistic expression grew early in the New Orleans native, and blossomed with the pre-professional art instruction she received from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). When she moved to Baton Rouge for college, she spent the weekdays alongside other Art Education majors at Louisiana State University. But one day, after students poured into the classroom and settled themselves, Hackney was told to go home and collect lint from the dryer. Coming from NOCCA’s tough fine arts curriculum, Hackney was dumbfounded by the entire “lint sculpture” assignment. “This is not where I’m supposed to be,” she thought to herself, and she changed her major. Fine Arts it would be.

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