Artist Statement

Jill Duffy creates abstract paintings shaped by a reciprocal relationship with the landscape she inhabits. Walking and tending the 225-year-old Hudson Valley farm she stewards are central to her practice. Paths are returned to repeatedly, tracing her own steps and those of generations before her. Daily engagement with the land offers a rhythm of grounding, quietude, and connection that informs each work.

Duffy’s process is immersive and sensory. Using earth and botanicals foraged or cultivated on the farm, she makes her own oil paints, inks, and charcoal through historic pigment-making techniques. Working on canvas, panel, and paper, she builds layered surfaces with ink and charcoal gestures followed by handmade paints and cold wax, dragging, scraping, and cutting back through the material to retrace these pathways within the work. Color and line retain a direct connection to their source – the land and the time spent in relationship with it.

Her paintings emerge from the intersection of movement, quietude, and natural material, where color carries traces of memory, time, and place. Layered through rhythms of walking, gathering, and making, each work holds both the physical presence of the landscape and the ongoing exchange that shaped it.

About the Artist

Jill Duffy is an artist, pigment maker, grower, and mother based in New York’s Hudson Valley. She has been making art since early childhood, later earning a BFA in illustration and graphic design, and spending over a decade working in design and advertising as an art director for fashion and lifestyle brands.

A move to the Hudson Valley marked a turning point in her life and practice. While raising two children, she gradually stepped away from her commercial career and toward a slower, more land-based way of living – focused on family, community, and time outdoors, while continuing to paint throughout.

Jill and her family now live and work on Farm & Field, which they established on a 210-acre Hudson Valley farm that has been continuously active since 1800, situated between the Hudson River and the Berkshire Mountains, two hours north of Manhattan. Keeping the land actively growing is central to her daily life and stewardship, and has deeply shaped her practice and way of working.

Jill founded Farm & Field as a place to reconnect with the land – where art, agriculture, and landscape exist in an ongoing relationship. Jill paints and teaches natural pigment-making workshops from the land and barn studio, with the impulse of igniting land-based connection for those who visit. The hayloft also serves as a pop-up exhibition space for Jill’s work and those of visiting artists.