Born in Jarrow in the North East in 1965, a constant childhood scribbler, Jacquie Boyd initially studied at Newcastle before she graduated from Lincolnshire College of Art and Design in 1987, having studied illustration and graphic design.
Jacquie Boyd began her working life as a visualiser and illustrator in the advertising industry in London, a busy job which she says taught her invaluable lessons about working to tight deadlines, and how to draw quickly.
Jacquie Boyd consequently worked in agencies in Edinburgh and Newcastle, moving back to her home town when she married. After becoming a mother of two little boys, she concentrated on developing her own children’s stories and freelance illustration work in greetings cards and editorial work for clients such as ICI, Bank of Scotland.
Jacquie then spent ten years teaching Graphic Design and Illustration at Newcastle College of Art and Design, remaining active in freelance illustration with storyboard work.
She began painting in 2002, and found immediate success with her iconic canvases in exhibitions in Newcastle. Moving into her first studio in 2004 prompted her to leave teaching to concentrate on her personal fine art work alongside her more commercial work. She likens this move to almost starting over from scratch.
She marketed her more commercial work through major trade fairs and gained regular customers through spaces at Psyche in Middlesborough, The Biscuit Factory in Newcastle, Off the Wall in Dublin, Customs House in South Shields, and Pierre Garroudi, Design Me, and My Floating World in London.
She has since enjoyed developing her style and fine art practice alongside regular educational workshops and art projects with local school children, and has had successful exhibitions in London and the north. Her first solo multimedia show in the summer of 2008 in the North East led to great critical acclaim, a show in which she examined her own childhood, teenage obsessions and effects of religious routines, through a collection of oil paintings, mixed media box sculptures, video and a stunning installation using over 300 hundred teenage dolls loaned by the public.
Jacquie Boyd’s styles are very much influenced by the working methods of her early career; her time in advertising was at the tail end of the era of magic markers, gouache and hand lettering. She is comfortable using computers but still believes in good drawing skills and loves a ‘hands-on’ approach and traditional methods.
Jacquie’s most recent illustration work has been used by clients including GQ magazine, Adidas, Instyle Magazine, Toyota, Net-a-Porter, and her current fine art acrylic work is available in select galleries across the UK, currently at Whitewall Gallery in Newcastle and Arthouse Gallery in Chingford.
