Celebration of Art 2010!

Meet guest artist:

JANE LEVY CAMPBELL

My paintings are combinations of the unexpected. I grew up in the heart of southern Appalachia and studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Princeton and Yale Universities in the early days of co-education there. I live and paint in Portland, Oregon, working primarily in watercolor.

I am an avid gardener and hiker. I often paint botanically detailed paintings on an unexpectedly monumental scale, or sweeping landscapes on a tiny handful of paper. I find particular challenge in creating an illusion of solid form and distinct time and place using the ethereally insubstantial materials of watercolor.

One of the things I most often hear during a studio open house is, “ I can’t believe the same artist painted all these different kinds of paintings.”

I do tackle a variety of subjects: landscapes, still-lifes, botanical studies, skyscapes, architecture, the occasional figure or face. Sometimes I blur the traditional distinctions between these subjects and paint large landscapes with finely detailed botanical foregrounds, or still-lifes with highly rendered botanical elements and more abstracted man-made objects.

I have a deep and abiding love and respect for the individual and the particular. In my painting there is an element of conservation of the passing moment, the ephemeral bloom, and the open space that may disappear in development in the future. I do not impose a style on my subjects. My response to the subject in that particular moment in that particular light dictates what degree of rendering, of impression, of abstraction and of expression tips the balance of choices I make. In thirty-five years of watercolor painting and experimenting one assembles a large toolbox of skills. Yet there is a unity of a recognizable hand.

My hand has been shaped by many things: A gluttonous love of color balanced by a love of subtlety. The discliplined training of Chinese brush painting . A broad education in cultural history. Travel. A love of nature dating back to earliest years in my mother’s garden and along my grandfather’s creek. My father’s photography dark room and the “ah-ha” moment of an image emerging from a white paper void. And yes, maybe a little bit of rebellion against the abstraction that was the art establishment of the 1960’s and 70’s of my formative years.

http://www.janelevycampbell.com