Gin and Soda

Gin and Soda, 2025
Oil on linen mounted on panel
12” x 9”

Jillian Shea (born 1999) is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California. She studied painting and drawing at California College of the Arts and has been showing work in the Bay Area since graduating in 2021. Shea found painting after experimenting with photography in their teenage years. Shea found the ability to accurately capture beautiful moments of light to be just the most spectacular thing. Shea began translating her photographs into drawings and then paintings. This led Shea to the magical world of capturing the beauty of light in paint. She looks to painters such as John Singer Sargent and Jenna Gribbon who to effortlessly describe a world on a canvas with luscious brushstrokes. Shea’s practice remains rooted in photography, though now centered around the snapshot as both a mode of contemporary documentation and memory-keeping. Their current series of paintings explores saturated color, the seductive light of the dive bar, and the intimacy of the nightlife ritual.