Jacqueline Yulick (Jackie) doesn’t invite you in; she leaves the door wide open. In her electric, color-drenched paintings, women stare back at you—not as dreamlike muses or passive symbols, but as powerful presences with stories to tell. “My art is the communication of emotions,” she says, and with every stroke, that emotion speaks volumes.
Yulick’s journey into painting wasn’t rooted in academia—it was born in the everyday. As a hairstylist, she chopped and shaped strands with an instinct for drama. DIY projects filled her downtime with texture, contrast, experimentation. Those early forays weren’t accidents; they were rehearsals, pushing against boundaries long before paint ever touched canvas. And when painting finally took hold, the language was already there—bold, tactile, impatient.
She doesn’t paint for decoration. “As a single mother of two beautiful girls, a dedicated mentor for teen girls in foster care…” Yulick reveals what fuels her—I couldn’t help but shorten the excerpt, but the sentiment is clear—art isn’t escapism. It’s essential. Each woman on her canvas is real and raw—not a figure to observe, but someone to confront. Her subjects look at you and weigh you instantly, and they keep weighing.
Angel | Model | Jackie
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In the galleries of St. Petersburg, where tourist-friendly pastels and curated pleasantness sometimes dominate, Yulick’s work feels like a voltage spike. It doesn’t cozy up; it disrupts. Collectors aren’t seeking harmony—they’re seeking collision. Her paintings are beautiful, yes—but in a way that catches you off guard. They ask you to stay with your discomfort, to lean in on their intensity. And they reverberate.
Her studio mirrors the restlessness of her work—a place cluttered with half-finished canvases, brushes abandoned, paint scents that ricochet off walls like challenge. She doesn’t sketch. She doesn’t plan. She enters, and the painting emerges. It is a gamble, but that’s the point. The chaos is her medium.
Florida’s art community has taken note—not for its pretty aesthetics, but for its unfiltered force. Her paintings don’t soften the room—they bend it. They’re intimate and explosive, personal and civic, polished and perilous all at once.
What gives her work its staying power is that charge between individual expression and shared experience. Viewers don’t just see their own reflections in her work—they feel like they’re in dialogue with it. It touches something communal, resisting easy categorization or commodification. That’s rare.
She’s carving a space—not just in the evolving landscape of contemporary art, but in the cultural guts of St. Petersburg and Tampa. She doesn’t ride the wave—she tests the edges. Her paintings fight for attention, and in doing so they force the city—and maybe beyond—to reckon with what female expression can look like when it refuses to be soft.
If her art hits, that’s because she knows how to hit back. Yulick doesn’t paint to blend in, and that refusal alone feels radical. St. Petersburg might be her base, but her vision is bigger. And the world should be ready. •
