Soul Art

Written by David King

Jill Pankey has won awards for her pencil drawings, painted striking scenes of pastoral beauty and even composed and executed wall-sized murals.

But the instructor in the Department of Art and Design at Texas State University keeps coming back to a theme, one splashed all over the walls of her studio. Women, in bright colors: Dancing. Turning somersaults. Twining around ribbons and bars and flowing fabrics. Loud.

“They keep surfacing every time I try to paint landscapes or something very contemporary,” she says with a laugh. “It keeps coming back to women. I’m very tuned in to the female form.

“Most women have the exact same issues of insecurity, body image, stress and life in general . . . we have a sisterhood.”

Like all artists, her orientation comes from her background. She always has loved dancing — she used it as a way to overcome being, as she described it, a “chubby kid.” In the 1970s, when she came to what was then known as Southwest Texas State, she joined the Strutters, the precision dance team. And for 20 years, she was the co-owner of a fitness business in Corpus Christi. She simply appreciates the human body in all its forms.

“Commercially, our society still targets the group that is under 30, thin, anti-wrinkled and non-cellulite — and often chooses surgery to enhance a perfect body,” she said. “The narrative paintings in my current work honor and celebrate a varied array of female forms through color and movement.”

Those colors — vivid and striking reds and blues and yellows — are the product of her childhood experiences.

“A lot of it came from growing up along the border next to Mexico (in Del Rio),” she said. “There were those little sprinklings of colored houses, and we’d go over there on the weekends and there would be these huge paper flowers. I was just fascinated by all the colors.”

She also has the perspective of someone who has a wide range of life experiences, and can laugh at them. Teri Evans-Palmer, one of Pankey’s colleagues at Texas State, said she has a “global sense of humor and seems to laugh at all the preening, human pretense.”

“All of her figures seem to be moving, jumping, leaping, somersaulting — restless and hurried, but yet maintaining a graceful balance,” Evans-Palmer said. “It is like lunging down the steps of football bleachers in ballet slippers with light-as-a-feather steps.”

Pankey’s distinctive style has earned her spots in galleries from South Texas to New York and beyond. One painting of a solitary — but still colorful — woman entitled “Remembering” won her the award of excellence at the Manhattan Arts International Gallery.

She even has attracted interest from overseas. The owner of a gallery in New Zealand saw one of her paintings in Austin and fell in love; Pankey wound up spending several months working at a gallery in Russell, New Zealand, on the northern tip of the South Pacific nation’s north island.

“The composition, use of color, pattern and overall technique caught me,” said Christine Aronson, director of the Just Imagine Gallery. “I have always believed that one buys art with one’s heart, and this painting took my heart.

“After purchasing the piece, I made it a point to find Jill and meet with her.”

For now, Pankey’s enthusiasm and depth of experience are populating everything she does. She jokes that if there was a job that had to do with art, she had done it, from serving as an art director at a television station to doing courtroom sketches to painting a 166-foot-long mural on a building in Corpus Christi.

Her latest adventure involves an even bigger project. She and her husband Bob, who is a professor in the Department of Health and Human Performance, recently bought a building in downtown Bryan, with plans to turn it into a gallery and a home once they have retired.

Pankey earned a master’s in interdisciplinary studies at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in 1992, then returned to college eight years later to work on a master of fine arts degree at UTSA. She has been at Texas State since she earned her MFA in 2002, working part-time at first and then going full time in 2007.

“This is the only thing I’ve really wanted to do,” she said of art. “I’ve never really cared about any other job. The only thing I can compare it to is eating and sleeping. It’s kind of part of my soul.”

Her students and her colleagues can see that every day. “We paint what we know, what we feel and what we dream,” Evans-Palmer said. “Jill’s work reflects her story.”