Jackie Little Miller is a self-taught, Oregon-based artist. Over the course of many years, she has developed her art style with no formal training: relying on trial and error, gleaning what she could from fellow artists and getting her hands on as much informational material as possible. Hard work and persistence has supplied skill to her lifelong passion of painting. When Jackie isn’t creating art in her personal studio, she serves as an instructor, teaching art classes and participating in art expositions.

As a creative person, Jackie often experiments with a variety of different paint mediums and techniques. She paints with oils, acrylics, watercolors and even coffee, finding that she enjoys depicting people the most. With the gift of dyslexia, she struggled in academics during childhood, but found she excelled in the arts. Faces fascinated her from the beginning. Even as a young girl, she studied faces and the way light played like music, touching every nuance of expression. During conversations, she is sometimes distracted–as her mind starts to wander into mapping the face or trying to figure out what colors to mix to capture a certain shadow–only to remind herself to listen to what the person has to say.

Jackie’s art is an extension of the joy that God brings into her life. Her latest series is based on Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 “To everything there is a season.” In this series, she is striving to expand her skills by expressing emotion solely through body language and not relying on facial expressions to convey a story.

Her overall goal is to create art that does not merely impress the viewer’s eyes, but to create something that will connect with the very heart and soul of those who see it. She draws her inspiration from an excerpt of an original poem her dad wrote when she was a small child:

“Many people’s lives are changed, by things we say and do; and they’ll be worse or better, because they once knew you.” – Butch Little