Jill McVarish makes her home in Astoria, Oregon. She grew up in the foothills of the Sacramento Valley, happily ensconced in an artistic family, one of eleven children. Her father, also a painter, encouraged her inventive nature and fostered the considerable creative talents which she exhibited at an early age.

Jill’s formal training began at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was introduced to a new world of art not only through the curriculum, but from the exchange of energies and ideas with her fellow students. In 1993, she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art, and then continued her academic pursuits abroad by enrolling in the prestigious Garett Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, which was founded by an architect and furniture designer internationally renowned as one of the forefathers of modernism.

While in Holland, she studied the Dutch masters and visited the van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum to experience the Vermeers, Holbeins and, most remarkably, the Rembrandts first-hand. McVarish often now reflects on that time as the most definitive in the formation of her style, blending her passion for contemporary art with a reverence and admiration for more traditional ways of painting.