Artist Info

How well do I love? How fully do I live? How deeply do I let go? Embracing these questions guide my life and creative process.

 Resonating with my subject, I paint my yearnings. I have a reverence for life, its rhythm a dance of season, its connected song of celebration. I paint stories with watercolour, oil, gouache and bits of foil and fabric. My art is my illumination. I listen to music while painting, native drum, Indian sitar, reed flute…world music that is the heart beat of our collective soul. I create paintings in one sitting with many hours of intensity that when I realize I am finished I then breathe.

Many of my paintings have leaves blowing across landscape or darkened star studded sky. Trees, buildings, roads have movement a lilt towards each other. The vineyards with fruit and golden leaves embrace its setting that answer to the distant mountains, that rumble and shimmer and answer to the rising moon. The trees sing in my land.

My latest series titled “I have a Dream” lined in gold, patterned in rich jewel colours. This is a landscape of meandering road to home surrounded countryside of olive and vineyard.

I lived in a centuries old farmhouse in the heart of Provence, France, and walked the countryside conversing with the farmers and sketched the connection of land to buildings. I remember our 89 year old neighbour who told me he was a peasant, while thumping his chest with pride. His family farmed the land for centuries. This simple rootedness I too feel in authentic cultures. I have felt this in Tibet, and India, and in the American Southwest. Land that is deeply held still by indigenous people. I live on a small island on the Pacific Coast of Canada, my studio on the ocean edge feeds my inspirations. Kayaking the protected tranquil waters with virginal nature at my door step I feel the ancient legends of the Native Culture. This deeply influences my paintings.

My art is my joy

Jill Louise Campbell