Biography

Jill London was born in LA and grew up in Connecticut.  She has a BA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, and her artistic awareness has been shaped by travel to Israel, Italy and Spain.

After graduating from college, Jill dove into the rambunctious downtown New York art scene and kept a Lower East Side studio for 41 years.  She worked in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s studio and apprenticed in traditional water gilding techniques with New York painter, frame-maker, gilder and goldsmith Robert Kulicke.

For six years, on and off, Jill was a printmaker and painter in Cuenca, Spain.  During her time there, the city mounted a one-woman show of her work, complete with a color monograph.

Many of Jill’s summers included making art in a cabin on Mount Desert Island, Maine, where she enjoyed the generous support and sanctuary provided by Aurelia Thistle Brown and her Wingspread Gallery.

Northern California’s allure became palpable, and Jill spent many subsequent years shuttling between her live/work/gardening spaces on New York’s 2^nd Street (where she was an active member of the Le Petit Versailles community garden) and San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood.

With The Gilder’s Studio she refined her architectural gilding skills and has gilded many spectacular structures, including the NY Life Building, DC’s Union Station, the Great Lion of Macau, Central Park’s General Sherman Statue and Kauai’s Hindu Monastery.

Jill is a much-sought-after gilding teacher.  She has taught at the Smithsonian Institution, was an Adjunct Professor at FIT SUNY for several years and enjoyed a residency at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco.   Jill served as Chair of Education at the Society of Gilders for fifteen years.

After decades of bicoastal hustle, she and her partner, artist Paul Nowell, have settled in the forests north of San Francisco.