Animal spirit

On huge canvases, Jill Richardson captures the essence of a menagerie of creatures.

Story + Photos Ricky French

Anything goes in Jill Richardson’s art studio, inside her bluestone farmhouse in western Victoria, and that includes the muddy paws of Butterball the golden retriever. The playful pup bounds up on a stool and sends a jar of paintbrushes flying across the floor. “Butter!” Jill admonishes, with only mock annoyance. Outside the studio window, a ravenous ewe and her 2 tiny lambs have got onto the lawn and are devouring the grass, but Jill can’t bring herself to shoo them back to the paddock. 

“Look at them,” Jill sighs. “How could you kick them out?”

The size of Jill’s heart is exceeded only by the size of her highly textural paintings, some of which are too large to fit in her studio. She paints in acrylic – a lot of acrylic – and the sheer size magnifies details: the finely layered feathers of a superb fairy-wren, the overlapping folds in the sagging skin of a Brahman bull, the sharp-edged glint of the outback sun reflected in the iris of an emu. Jill is currently working on a life-sized painting of a Speckle Park bull. The canvas is over 2.5m long and propped up on paint cans in the largest room in the house. Art installers are often amused to see Jill pull up outside the gallery towing a horse float. “It’s the only thing that will fit my paintings,” Jill says. “And it’s perfect, because horses are my greatest love.”