Jessica Lily is an award-winning watercolorist based in metro-Atlanta, Georgia. Her work explores the emotional and symbolic language of plants, light, and place. With a background in both realism and abstraction, she creates intimate garden studies and immersive, large-scale botanical works as part of her ongoing Garden Portals series. Jessica often paints native plants or species found at her own garden and others, bridging the everyday with the sacred.
Her paintings have been featured in juried exhibitions throughout the Southeast, and she is an active member of national and regional watercolor societies. In addition to exhibiting and selling her work, Jessica teaches both in-person and online workshops, where she is known for her supportive, insight-driven guidance that helps students build real skills and confidence.
Jessica teaches watercolor classes at Woodlands Gardens through the Atlanta Watercolor Group. She is a member of the Georgia Watercolor Society, the American Watercolor Society, Women in Watercolor and the Atlanta Portrait Society. See her resume for the complete list.
She holds a degree in Fine Art from the University of Georgia and was the recipient of a drawing scholarship upon entering UGA. She has a lifelong passion for working in the fine arts, and supporting the arts community around her.
In her Garden Portals series, watercolorist Jessica Lily offers botanical works that act as meditations on light, memory, and the terrain of womanhood. Blending realism with abstraction and symbolism, these paintings straddle softness and structure, power and fragility as they invite viewers into immersive spaces that are at once rooted and other-worldly.
Drawing from native and cultivated plants in the Southeastern United States, Lily’s florals are strikingly unapologetic. Her azaleas are riotous in color, her roses are half-blurred behind veils, and her lilacs caught beneath a maze of dancing shadow and light. Each composition holds tension between visibility and restraint. This is A Lot celebrates the contradictions placed on women, asking them to be radiant, but not overwhelming, beautiful but effortless, full of life but never too much. Lily’s flowers don’t comply. They take up space, and in doing so, reclaim it.
In Sage Wisdom, layered blooms evoke a kind of cross-temporal conversation, an inner dialogue with our past, present, and aging selves. These works ask: What is the wisdom we carry across time?
Garden Portals is not just about gardens. It’s about the internal landscapes we tend. It’s about showing up with fullness, multi-faceted, with light, with too muchness. Naming that as sacred.
Each painting becomes an invitation: to pause, to feel, and to see both ourselves and the natural world with renewed compassion and reverence.
Short Artist Bios
Jessica Lily is a watercolor artist based in the Atlanta area whose Garden Portals series explores the emotional terrain of womanhood through botanical symbolism and immersive, light-filled compositions. Her work blends softness with strength, realism with abstraction, inviting women to reconnect with their own creative wildness and inner knowing. Through each painting, she hopes to offer moments of reflection, reclamation, and renewal.
Jessica Lily’s work is rooted in the Southeast: she works often with native plants and with garden spaces that are familiar to her. Lily’s current body of work, Garden Portals, explores the terrain of womanhood through botanical symbolism and metaphor. Her painting process is a healing meditation centered on duality. Light and shadow, softness and strength, realism with abstraction. Lily’s work is an invitation for women to reconnect with their own creative wildness and inner knowing. Through each painting, she hopes to offer moments of reflection, reclamation, and renewal.
For most of my adult life, I lived with an undiagnosed condition that eventually forced me to end my long-held career as a photographer. In 2023, I was finally diagnosed with a rare form of Dysautonomia and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder, and for the first time in years, I began to heal as I started to access the treatment I had needed for so long. Painting, which I had picked back up during a season of chronic pain and disability, became both my physical therapy and my emotional lifeline.
I returned to watercolor during one of the most painful chapters of my life, when I suddenly lost the use of my dominant arm for nearly three months, a complication from my chronic condition. I had always wanted to paint a fantasy portrait of my daughter that was complete with her dream of a baby-doll unicorn palace, but never made the time. As my arm began to slowly recover, I pulled out my watercolors and painted through the pain, not knowing if I would ever actually regain full use of my arm. That painting became the first step in a profound reconnection with my artist self. Later, I learned that the gentle repetition of painting had actually helped heal my arm. Painting, quite literally, saved me.
Though I studied art in college, it was not until my 40s that I fully claimed my identity as an artist. Now, I paint to honor the tenderness of the body, sacred spaces in our natural world, and the inner knowing that lives inside each of us. My work explores the emotional terrain of womanhood through light, shadow, and botanical metaphor. It is a joy to now teach and create in community, inviting others to reconnect with their own creative wildness.
