She paints the world as it could be.
Jill Karlin is a visionary painter, lifelong Yogini, and the Co-Founder of EKOTECTURE — the 100% self-sustainable environmental architecture she and Lee Porter Butler brought into the world in 1992. She has been called "Mother of the environmental architecture movement." My Vision sets me apart.
Her Art is classically trained — Europe, the Boston Ballet, the Boston Symphony, the Villa Montalvo in Saratoga California 1981, the Oberoi New Delhi 1992, the Rugg Road Paper Making Studio — and entirely her own: flowing, luminous, rich with the textures of a life lived in full colour. She paints in oil, gouache, mixed media, handmade paper pulp, and plein air — whatever the Vision demands.
"Luxe, calme et voluptu." That is the world I paint into existence. Not a wish. A duty.
The love that became EKOTECTURE
Lee Porter Butler was an architect who understood that every building is an act of love or an act of war against the Earth. Together, in 1992, they co-created EKOTECTURE — a complete paradigm for how humanity will live on this planet: self-sustaining, beautiful, in radical accord with soil, water, air, light, flowers, sunshine.
Lee left on November 22, 2005. The Vision did not depart with him. His architectural archives have since been donated to North Carolina State University — an institution receiving the full body of a life's work. I carry the Vision forward, and I carry it as a duty, not as a consolation — through every painting, every class, every stage, every Dolphin that swims through my canvas. The Edinburgh Fringe show of 2026 is my tribute to him and to the tree that held the dream when everything else fell.
"He believed that beauty and sustainability are the same thing. I paint that belief every day."
The practice: 1961 to now
Seven years old. 1961. Her sister's living room in Boston. The lineage of Swami Vishnu-devananda — undiluted, as it was given to her, as she passes it on still. That was the beginning, and it has never stopped. She has taught the practice — undiluted, as it was given to her — to rock stars, to an astronaut who walked on the Moon, to heads of corporations, to royalty, to children across every spectrum of ability. But mostly to regular folks.
Yoga, Art, EKOTECTURE. These are not separate pursuits. They are three expressions of a single transmission: the certainty that paradise on Earth is not a metaphor.
Jill Karlin at a glance
What Jill paints
Stay inside the Vision
New paintings · Edinburgh dispatches · EKOTECTURE updates — from Jill's studio in Lake Worth, Florida
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