About Jacqueline McAbery


Jacqueline McAbery lives in Northern California. She has a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and a dual M.A. in Clinical Psychology and Creative Art Therapy from Antioch University. She started her art career at 21 as a free-lance fine arts photographer. Eventually her interest in psychology drew her back to school for her M.A. Since creativity and the creative process are important to her, art therapy became a way to combine her interest in art and psychology. In the early 1980’s Jacqueline decided it was time to expand her creative abilities and returned to the San Francisco Art Institute to get her B.F.A. Since that time she has worked in oil, acrylic, watercolor, collage, encaustic, and photography. She likes to find ways to combine different mediums. In her oil paintings she will often use either ink or acrylic as her base. Although her first interest is oil painting she also gets excited about her photography. She has been working with digital photography and photoshop. Her present work includes oil painting and experimentations with mixing encaustic, photography and painting into mixed media pieces. Currently she exhibits in the United States. She has had articles written about her work in American Art Collector and the Journal of Managed Care Pharmacy. Her work has won awards and is in private collections throughout the United States and Canada. Jacqueline’s statement, “With whatever medium I use, the process is about defining the images I see in order to give voice to my emotional and intuitive responses which often allows the unexpected and accidental to unfold. Aspects of nature are the inspiration for my paintings. The heart of nature’s beauty instill in me a sense of awe, wonder, and fear as I am drawn into its world of mystery, power, depth, impermanence, light and dark. My paintings are my attempt to interpret and catch the fleeting beauty that surrounds us and is a way to embrace the unknown. As I work, I experience my reaction to a given moment; in that instant the complex becomes simple. Time stands still and moves on at the same time. The visceral act of painting leads me into the realm of constant change and movement. As I touch beauty, I see that she never sits still and is always beckoning me on.”