February 5 to 26 • Regitz Gallery

Opening reception: Friday, February 5, 2027 • 5-8 PM

A glowing ear. Yellow leaves. An untethered kite. These images have persisted in Kendyll Hillegas’ awareness since childhood, like intermittent visual background noise. They appear without warning, often precipitating a cascade of emotion the artist calls The Feeling—a sudden longing, an acute awareness of time, an intense desire to know and be known. Through colorful oil paintings, Kept Like a Secret is Hillegas’ attempt to paint The Feeling by chasing the images that summon it, turning up the volume on the background noise and seeing where it leads. 

About the Artist

Kendyll Hillegas is an award-winning illustrator and fine artist known for technical and emotional realism. Over the past decade, she has collaborated with clients including Coca-Cola, A24 Films, and Vanity Fair on a wide range of commercial and editorial projects. Her recent body of oil paintings expands on the precise, vivid realism she is known for as an illustrator, adding new layers of narrative complexity through landscape, large-scale portraits, and close-cropped figurative compositions. She exhibited her debut solo show “Kept Like a Secret” at The Gallery at St. Mary’s, Manhattan, in late 2025. She holds a BFA in Painting and works from her studio in York, Pennsylvania.