Jill Soukup | Dream Catcher

By Norman Kolpas

When Jill Soukup’s majestic oil on canvas painting REVERIE debuted last autumn in her solo show of 37 works within the grand entry of the recently completed Johnson Family Equine Hospital at Colorado State University, it both literally and figuratively represented a dream come to life. Mighty, muscular and graceful, the deep cacao-colored horse had galloped across a canvas in the artist’s slumbering mind. She had awakened and recorded the image in the journal she keeps by her bedside to document such nighttime visions. Not coincidentally, that little drawing also echoed a working sketch she’d made pre-pandemic in the process of ideating a very differently posed commissioned painting of a horse owned by clients in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. “The image came from a video I’d taken of their horse,” she recalls. “It was a very quick moment in time, which I captured in two values in a sketch maybe 3 inches long. But I kept coming back to it.” Not coincidentally, that actual steed had been a patient at CSU’s facility.

Finally, with her exhibition scheduled for the veterinary venue at the university where she had earned her BFA back in 1991, Soukup embarked on the journey of bringing her dream image to reality. She began with a trio of gouache studies about 7 inches long. “My first feeling,” she recalls, “was it had to be colorful, bold and expressive, like the personality of that horse.” Having decided on a composition featuring the horse in full profile, she photographed the sketch and then projected that rendering onto a wall in the studio of her home in the foothills just outside of Denver, determining what she felt would be the ideal scale before ordering a custom 72-by-92–inch canvas. “I had done a few murals when I was in high school,” she says with an air of bemusement at the dimensions of one of the largest works she’s tackled since that earlier time.

Over the next two and a half weeks, working eight to 10 hours a day, Soukup embarked on the actual painting journey. She began by projecting her working sketch onto the white-primed canvas, capturing that initial outline in a thinned-down wash of paint, “because I really liked the simplicity of the loose, quick and more abstract strokes in that study, allowing the expression to come through.” Then, gradually, “I refined the image in about five different layers, working on one area at a time while I would wait for the paint in another area to reach a specific dryness,” using in the process a wide variety of tools ranging from a #1 artist’s brush that measures less than a tenth of an inch wide, to a pair of hardware store finds: a 10-inch brush and a 12-inch palette knife. Finally, having repeatedly returned to the canvas, gaining fresh perspectives by gazing at it upside down or in a mirror, “so that it’s like looking at it for the first time,” she deemed the painting completed. “That’s probably the hardest part.”

By contrast, titling the work was relatively easy, with “reverie” capturing the notion of a dreamlike state that echoes not only the inspiration but also Soukup’s creative process and the ultimate, enthralling image. “From beginning to end,” she says, “there was something about this painting that felt so free. After all the years of learning and trying to understand the formal foundations of what makes an artwork beautiful, I didn’t have to think about them. They just came naturally.”

The urge to make art also came naturally to Soukup. “From a very young age, growing up in Denver, I knew that I wanted to be an artist,” she says. “As soon as I could pick up a pencil, I was drawing all the time. I would copy pictures out of books, and really didn’t have any formal art education until I got to Smoky Hill High School, where I had really incredible art teachers.” It seemed a natural next step to earn her BFA at CSU, where she capitalized on their “very strong graphic design program. I knew I did not want to do the starving artist thing right out of college.” Instead, she went on to work for a decade as a graphic designer at Denver Museum of Nature & Science. All the while, she kept painting in her spare time, regularly taking classes at the respected Art Students League of Denver while creating landscapes, city scenes, figurative works and still lifes.

Eventually, she began cutting back her time at the museum and, in 2003, she made the leap to becoming a full-time fine artist. That year also marked another key turning point with her introduction to a spread run by the Colorado-based, conservation-minded ranch management company called Ranchlands, which oversees properties throughout the West. “And, gradually, I was doing more paintings of Western subjects”—not only horses but also such related iconic images as working cowboys, cattle, bison and well-worn ranch machinery. Her growing body of work led, in turn, to her 2009 debut in the prestigious annual Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale in Denver, in which she’s participated nearly every year since.

Along the way, Soukup has continued to evolve and refine not only her painterly style but also the deep thought that determines and inspires what, why and how she paints. “I know that the Western theme, and particularly equines, has very much dominated my subject matter,” she says. “But really, everything I paint has as an underlying current of the more abstract content of duality.”

Lest such a statement seem as if she is veering into heady philosophical matters that may run counter to the pure, simple enjoyment of beautiful art, she quickly offers an explanation that makes her meaning not only clear and relatable but also, in the process, deepens any viewers’ appreciation of her work. “Think about anything in your life,” Soukup suggests. “There’s almost always a polar opposite to it, like male and female, night and day, cold and warm—really an infinite amount of such pairs. So, I apply that idea to the elements of art: You’ve got dark and light colors, warm and cool, chromatic and dull. Edges can be soft or hard. There’s a long list of dualities that can be applied to art elements.” And when an artist—through skill, knowledge, observation, inspiration and talent—“takes both ends or sides of a duality and figures out how they dance together, that is where you find beauty,” she says. “I’m always exploring the polar opposites of any element in a painting, and then how they integrate with each other in a way that creates something beautiful.”

Such an aesthetic philosophy applies for Soukup not only to living creatures like horses but also to the inanimate objects of ranching life. Take, for example, TRACTOR WHEEL, a painting she completed in 2022. “This is actually part of my personal collection,” she notes, “because I felt like I had so many breakthroughs on it in terms of paint application.” Starting with a side-view reference photograph she’d taken of the entire tractor, she decided to zero in tightly on the wheel, drawn to “the abstract quality of this big, round, central structure.” Then, “just creating,” she continues, “I applied the paint freely,” without doing any advance sketches and even adding to the realistic image such abstract and painterly touches as small splashes of orange on the rubber tire and steel hub and thin transparent layers of paint that endow the finished image with rich depth. Meanwhile, even in its portrayal of a mundane piece of machinery, beauty abounds through duality, “with the complementary colors of blue and orange, darks and lights, the black of the wheel and the white of the center, hard straight lines and soft curved lines.” There’s even, it might be added, the pleasing duality of a real-world object presented as an almost abstract composition.

Having arrived now at such a point of demonstrable certainty in her skills and clarity in her vision, Soukup has begun to teach more, “just sharing my love of art and the things I find so helpful in becoming the best artist that I can be, including the duality concept, which has been such a great tool to refine my paintings and make them stronger.” She’s recently completed offering an online workshop on horse anatomy for artists and come November will be leading a weeklong artists’ retreat—featuring lots of plein air painting—in ruggedly beautiful Andalucia, Spain. “One of my obsessions that I haven’t explored yet is rocks,” she concludes with a warm laugh. “So, we’ll have some opportunities there for that kind of landscape.”

Norman Kolpas is a San Rafael, California-based freelancer who also writes for various art publications. He teaches creative writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA, UCLA Extension.

This story appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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