Jill E. Schiller
Jill E. Schiller’s work begins with drawing but extends through color, collage, and the repeated testing of small formal changes. Her geometric pen-and-ink designs, radial compositions, and animal collages share a common foundation: careful pattern work developed through slow, precise looking.
Schiller grew up in an art-rich household. Her mother was an elementary art teacher, and she and her sister had steady access to art supplies, crafts, and hand-made traditions. One of the most formative was pysanky, the Ukrainian wax-resist method for decorating eggs. Though Schiller is not of Ukrainian heritage, the practice came into her family through a great-aunt who passed it on to her mother, aunts, and eventually her generation.
Pysanky introduced Schiller to radial structure, symbolic forms, and geometric pattern. It also gave her an early model for working through variation, where a repeated motif can be altered through small shifts in line, color, or placement.
Her mother’s own habits of making art were equally influential. She would create hand-drawn cards for birthdays and holidays and sketch patterns while talking on the phone or writing a grocery list. Schiller remembers being impressed by that ease of beginning. As a child, she created a simple coded alphabet made from small symbols, initially to write “secret” messages with friends. The symbols became a practical entry point into drawing.
Once she had a few marks on the page, the blank surface no longer felt intimidating. In high school, Schiller began combining her coded symbols with pysanky-inspired patterns in a notebook. She first adapted the drawings into black-and-white eggs, but soon found that she preferred the preliminary process of doodling and sketching to working around the egg’s three-dimensional form. From there, she began making pen-and-ink geometric patterns as independent works.
Color entered the practice gradually. In college, Schiller continued the family tradition of making cards for friends and began using bright highlighters as backgrounds for her black-ink radial designs. The highlighter fields made the ink appear more pronounced, while also giving her a simple and economical way to expand her palette.
Her professional path did not begin in an art program. In college, Schiller was unsure what course of study or career to pursue. She enjoyed art but did not want to become a teacher, and she was conscious of the instability and competitiveness of selling work. Her pace also made a conventional art-school schedule feel impractical. She works slowly and with considerable attention to precision, and often found herself finishing one project while classmates had already moved on to the next.
Art remained a side practice until she considered transferring closer to home after two semesters of linguistics graduate classes in Chicago. Her mother encouraged her to begin selling her geometric pen-and-ink work, and Schiller started JES Designz. Through arts and crafts shows, she developed a way to bring her designs into a public and commercial context without abandoning the careful, process-driven character of the work.
Experimentation has remained central. Black gel pen was her original medium of choice because it allowed her to make dense, clean designs without visible strokes. She later incorporated acrylic paint and paint pens, using painted surfaces alongside outlined radial forms.
A significant shift came in 2020, when she began working in collage. While preparing for craft shows, Schiller turned prints of her geometric drawings into wearable work by punching circles from the paper and placing them into costume-jewelry settings. Rather than discard the remaining paper, she used a smaller 6mm circular punch to collect the scraps.
During lockdown, when art shows were canceled, those small leftover circles became the material for her first dot collage. She arranged them on paper according to the outline of one of her geometric designs. The resulting surface led to further experiments, including a sheep collage in which pen-and-ink defined the legs and head while the paper circles created the animal’s wool.
Schiller then expanded into animal subjects, moving between dot collage, mosaic-like arrangements, and more conventional cut-paper construction. A seahorse and sea turtle, for example, were made with square paper punches that functioned like mosaic tiles against the background paper. Across these variations, one principle remained consistent: the collages were constructed from leftover prints of her own geometric drawings.
That use of materials connects the earlier drawings and later collages without treating either as secondary. The abstract patterns become color, texture, and structure within representational images. In more recent work, Schiller has also begun designing papers specifically for certain collages. When scraps do not provide the needed color, she creates backgrounds with alcohol-ink markers, adds geometric drawing in colored pencil, scans and prints the design, and then cuts it into collage material.
Schiller is particularly interested in transitions: the way a slight alteration in line weight can change a shape into a radial design, or how a single hue moves through lighter and darker values. She often revisits a composition in multiple color systems, including monochromatic series and color-wheel arrangements. The practice is cumulative, built by asking what will happen if a design, palette, or collage method is adjusted just once more.
Her visual sources extend beyond the studio. Architecture, wrought iron, mosaics, quilts, and photographs of animals all inform the work. Customer requests at craft shows have also opened new directions, from playing-card suits to musical instruments inspired by her great-uncle’s jazz quartet. These interactions have encouraged Schiller to take on subjects she might not have considered independently.
Across drawing, print, and collage, Schiller’s work remains rooted in the same early discovery: a small mark can be enough to begin. From there, patterns accumulate, materials are repurposed, and each variation becomes the basis for another.
