Jill Sykes's Icons of Natural Beauty
- Kristine Schomaker
- Jul 23
- 3 min read
By Betty Ann Brown
"Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation — I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances."—Henri Matisse
Jill Sykes creates beautiful paintings of botanical phenomena. Like Matisse, she translates three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, occupying the territory between abstraction and representation to achieve balance and equilibrium.
From a very early age, Sykes knew she was an artist. Drawing was both her form of personal expression and her refuge. She focused on art throughout her education and received further training as a street portraitist on Main Street in Disneyland, graphic designer, and contributor to educational films.
Throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, she produced large, abstract paintings on unprimed canvas. In 1996, Sykes moved to the Brewery Arts Complex in Los Angeles, had her first professional exhibition there, and soon became an integral part of the Brewery community. In 2001, she switched from acrylic to oil paint and from abstraction to abstracted representation.
That year, Sykes exhibited Blue Cymbidium, an oil-on-canvas depiction of orchid leaves. Rather than focus on the blossoms, she depicted the spikey leaves in a dance of blue lines with shadowy red counterpoints. The artist remembers that when famed artist and teacher Roland Reiss saw it, he called it "fabulous." Reiss encouraged her to continue — which she did, with enthusiasm.
Polo (2013) is a horizontal diptych on two panels. A dozen green fronds dance across a pale pink background. The fronds are flattened silhouettes, their complex contours creating a lacy calligraphy. The deep green fronds are highlighted in red. Sykes understands color theory and knows that using red, the complement of green, will make both colors pop.
In 2017, Sykes paired her botanical painting with her feminist politics in a series entitled The Marchers. Remembering that her own mother had been born before women could vote, the artist decided to celebrate the suffragettes. She represented them with images of flowers from each woman's home region: Margaret Sanger by a wood lily, Ida B. Wells by a Southern magnolia, Helen Keller by a camellia. Assembled as a grid, the paintings refer to white-clad suffragettes from both the United States and Britain, reminding us how much we owe our forebears.
In 2020, Sykes honored Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Justice, a triptych featuring Ginsburg's signature necklace. Justice was so popular that after the original sold, the artist was commissioned to do a second version for another collector.
More recently, Sykes has been working on Dots, a series of small images presenting gold-leaf flowers on brilliantly hued backgrounds. The works are painted on tondos — round wooden panels. Burgundy (2026) features a sparkling gold lily on a deep red ground. The flower is luminous. The artist's use of gold leaf recalls historic religious icons featuring the same material. Like such icons, Sykes's images are frontal and symmetrical, and they beckon the viewer to quiet contemplation.
In addition to her paintings of flowers and other botanicals, Sykes has also created installations. Yucca Forest was a site-specific installation produced for the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. Eighteen ten-foot-tall Joshua Tree silhouettes cut out of white vinyl were arrayed on the windows of what the museum calls its "Jewel Box," an elevated room overlooking the street outside. Seen from both inside and outside the museum, and through changing lighting conditions, Sykes's images created a visual forest honoring the endangered desert plants. Joshua Trees are a form of yucca.
A standard art historical dictum is that what is depicted is what is valued. Painfully aware of the catastrophic losses due to climate change, Jill Sykes celebrates the abundance and variety of the natural world. She presents botanical diversity as beautiful — and therefore as profoundly valuable. Early environmentalist Rachel Carson asserted, "Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts." Jill Sykes's art portrays the beauty of the earth for our aesthetic reflection.
Betty Ann Brown is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Los Angeles.
