By Shya Beth
From the outside, the path that leads someone to become an equine artist often looks linear: early talent, steady training and a natural progression into professional work. But for Georgia-based artist Jill Johnson, the story is much more like the layers she paints across canvas: layered, revisited, shaped through memory and faith, guided by an unexplainable pull toward horses that began before she knew what “artist” even meant.
Today, Jill’s work is known for its emotional depth, luminous atmosphere and the almost spiritual presence that her horses exude. But her journey didn’t begin in Georgia. It began far north, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a little girl filled every scrap of paper with horses. “I drew horses constantly,” Jill said. “My family teased that I was ‘horse crazy,’ but it wasn’t a phase—it felt like identity.”
That relentless passion carried her into the TAM-O-SHANTERS program, a prestigious children’s art course affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University. Selected multiple times to “go to the easel” in front of more than a thousand students, Jill’s drawings were enlarged in pastel while she presented her process on stage. “Those moments were huge for me,” she recalled. “They taught me to take art seriously. They also taught me that other people could see what I felt inside.”
Though financial limitations prevented her from later pursuing formal art school, those early years cemented the foundation she would rely on decades later, as did her time around horses as a young child. Jill spent summers weaving potholders to earn riding money, which bought her hours at local stables where she learned to ride, groom and simply be near horses. “Those barns shaped me. The smell of hay, the stillness of early mornings, the softness of a horse’s eye—it all seeped into who I am.”
Those early sensations now live in her paintings: a lifted head, a softened breath, a step taken with intention. In 1991, Jill moved to Georgia, arriving just in time for a record-setting snowstorm. What she didn’t know then was that both the landscape and the horses she would meet there would eventually guide her artistic rebirth.
The Long Winter
For over 30 years, Jill’s life pivoted away from art and toward a demanding management career. “Art never left me,” she said. “But it was silent. Waiting.”
That silence broke after a divorce, when Jill found herself needing additional income that wouldn’t interfere with her full-time job. With courage and prayer, she returned to charcoal and paper, unsure whether the skill she had as a teenager could be recovered.
Her first drawing was “Azabache,” a powerful portrait of a Friesian stallion. “Azabache” went on to win awards, including a feature in Artists Magazine, and became the pivot point where Jill stopped doubting whether she was meant to be an artist. She began producing steadily, slowly building her confidence and presence in the art world first as a second career alongside her job, and now, following retirement, as her primary calling.
Pursuing this calling means that Jill has dedicated her craft to honoring subtleties that most people miss. “A single tilt of the head can say trust,” she said. “Or alertness. Or peace. I try to show the emotion behind the moment. A pivotal experience deepened my sensitivity of their movements—standing quietly at a rescue ranch in Cumming, Georgia, where a gray horse approached me. I closed my eyes, letting my fingers trace the planes of the horse’s face, feeling the shapes beneath the skin—muscle, bone—and the image formed inside me like memory.”
Mediums With Meaning
Jill’s artistic roots lie in charcoal, graphite and soft pastel, mediums that require precision and intentional light. Through them, she honed the essentials of art, which are gesture, value and anatomical accuracy.
Pastel became her entryway into color, but her true breakthrough arrived the first time she picked up oils. Her debut oil painting, “Abiah’s Whisper,” explored the glow and atmosphere that have become her signature. Another oil, “Auriel, Dawn Runner,” won an award and affirmed that she had found her medium.
“I realized everything I had done, all the years of drawing, studying light, learning structure, had prepared me for oils,” Jill said. Her style today is what she calls emotive realism: anatomically grounded but softened and shaped by mood. She no longer strives to render every detail and instead invites the viewer into the intangible space where light, shadow and the equine spirit meet.
Whether Jill begins with a photograph, a live horse, a memory or simply a feeling, every piece begins the same way: with story. “Abiah was a bowed white horse listening to God’s whisper,” she said. “I saw that before I ever touched canvas.”
Today, Jill is beginning a new chapter at Whispering Angels Youth Ranch in Gainesville, Georgia, a horse therapy ranch where she now lives. She will soon volunteer as an art mentor for the children there, something she sees as both ministry and calling.
“I want to bring healing and encouragement through both art and horses,” she said. “They’ve given me so much. This is a way to give back. At the end of the day, I always come back to the same joy of showing the beauty of the horse.”
Follow “Jill Johnson – Georgia Horsepainter” on Facebook or @georgia_horsepainter on Instagram or visit jilljohnsonfineart.com
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