My paintings are combinations of the unexpected.  I grew up in the heart of southern Appalachia and studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton and Yale 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 a 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.

Copyright © Jane Levy Campbell, Portland OR. All Rights Reserved.

I paint 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.

The size of my work ranges from as small as a postcard to twenty feet long.  The largest pieces are multiple panel compositions which offer the flexibility of unifying a single wall or several walls by wrapping around the corners of a room or by flanking actual architectural elements such as doors, columns, windows or bookcases.  Single pieces are up to 40 x 60”.

I do not impose a style on my subject matter.  My response to the subject in that particular moment in that particular light dictates what degrees of rendering, of impression, of abstraction and of expression tip the balances of the choices I make.  It is in a way, an attempt to capture the ephemeral.  Yet there is a recognizable hand.

My hand has been shaped by many things:  A gluttonous love of color balanced by a love of subtlety.  Formative study years when abstraction and expressionism held sway in academia. ( I was always a bit of a quiet rebel.)  The disciplined training of Chinese brush painting.  A broad education in cultural history.  Travel.  A love of nature dating back to my mother’s garden and my grandfather’s creek.  My father’s darkroom and the “ ah-ha” moment of an image emerging from a white paper void.

There are spoken, written and sung forms of expression in which words are primary.  A painting has to be first and foremost a visual experience.

Jane Levy Campbell