Jacqueline Butterworth is a member of the Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory
Born in 1987 at precisely 6:10 am on a sunny Saturday in Sydney, Australian artist Jacqueline Michell Butterworth has been painting as long as she can remember. These days a full-time visual artist based between Sydney and London, she specialises in hyper realistic oil paintings and murals.
One moment sacred, the next irreverent, Jacqueline creates vibrant, imaginative paintings that will either sweep you up or draw you in – often oscillating between grand, complex compositions and quieter, more intimate pieces.
Her sophisticated and beautiful technique is informed by a veritable melting pot of historic painting traditions. From Mannerism and the Baroque to the Romantic and Symbolist movements of the late 19th Century. In fact, one of Jacqueline’s earliest pieces, Lion with Six Legs (circa 1990) also denoted an interest in Surrealism that carries through to her practice today.
Drawing from a well of personal experience and inspired by all those things that connect us as living matter, Jacqueline Butterworth’s ‘no longer still’ still life paintings are cheeky, self-deprecating, cathartic, hopeful, and yet altogether deeply moving.
There are descending ladders of meaning in her work, indicative perhaps of Jacqueline’s long-standing love of symbolism as a means of storytelling; conjuring narratives that explore themes of love, grief, power, change, and resilience.
All the while, they playfully subvert our urban encroachment on natural habitats, depicting opulent scenes that are overrun by wildlife. Here peacocks, pelicans and peachy-faced corellas might take center stage, cavorting like courtesans from Old Master paintings, becoming not so much gatecrashers as the life of the party.
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