Jill Lareaux has been making art professionally for thirty years. Her art has been the substance with which she has funded her formal art education and the medium that sustains her desire to learn.

     She still remembers her first drawing as a child, “I sat on the floor and drew it on the kitchen door with an orange crayon. It was a giraffe with four legs. I was surprised, at the time, that I didn’t get punished.”

    Lareaux grew up in North Lansing, Michigan in the 1950’s surrounded by an extended family of individualists each with their own creative ability. Among them was her grandparents, who renovated an old farmhouse and filled it with handmade items gathered on their travels to every continent in the world. “The Farm” was a haven of books, music, pottery, blown glass from Mexico, wood sculpture from Haiti, masks and shields from Africa and textiles from India, Thailand and Egypt. It provided Lareaux, as a young person, a window to other world cultures. Her Great Aunt Lille Brodhagen, a professional painter, provided perhaps the most direct influence on Lareaux’s will to become an artist. Although she never knew her aunt, she grew up with Lille’s paintings all around her. They were a subtle introduction to the power of artistic vision and would form the matrix of Lareaux’s innate desire to create art.

     While raising her three children in Eaton Rapids, Michigan Lareaux completed two degrees from Lansing Community College in Fine Art and Illustration and became a well respected artist in the Lansing art community. She was extremely tenacious about her art education and utilized every resource available to learn about art including Oxbow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan, an affiliate of the SAIC, Chicago, IL. At Oxbow, over the last twenty years, she has worked to advance her study of ceramic art and printmaking with respected professionals such as Joe Seigenthaler, Eva Kwong, Fred Gude, Will Peterson and Roland Ginzel. During this time she also taught classes in drawing, watercolor, printmaking and mixed media and exhibited extensively while maintaining her studio in the historic Horner Woolen Mill and later in the old Miller Ice Cream Factory in Eaton Rapids.

     In 1999 she moved with her husband to west Michigan, located near the cities of Saugatuck and Douglas, to establish Clayfield Studios. Together they renovated three barns into studios where she has the freedom to build both small and large-scale ceramic sculpture and to continue to explore any medium she desires.

     Her deep love of learning has upheld her personal commitment to herself as a creative soul and has evolved into the rich visual language and skill that distinguishes her work today.