“Art has been a thread throughout my life. It has spiraled through many forms and brought me in touch with many crafts, people, and places.”
Jeanne Bouza Rose
I have been inspired by the colours, structures, standing stones, and life of Orkney for over thirty years. Using watercolour, oil paint, and oil sticks, I render landscapes and sky onto canvas, paper and lampshades in my Stromness studio/gallery. My oil paintings range from grandly large to small and intimate. My room-size works are done on unstretched canvas that is either bolted to a wall or hung so they move like a banner. Because size matters, these are often reproduced and reduced in size, using high quality pigment giclee printing techniques onto paper or stretched canvas in small limited editions. Sometimes I even use lampshades as a canvas and paint various landscapes or designs on them, bringing art into any home under a brighter light!
The Provincetown Print method ties two parts of my life as an artist together, as well as the history of two countries. I have had a lifetime of summers and weekends in the Catskill Mountains, near the town of Woodstock, New York. Over 20 years ago, I learned this printmaking, from Pia Oste-Alexander at the Woodstock School of Art. The Woodstock School of Art began in 1968 on the grounds of the 1906 summer centre of the Art Students League of New York. One of the original 1915 developers of the Provincetown Print technique was Blanche Lazzelle who, in 1919, was a resident at the historic “Byrdcliffe Arts Colony” in Woodstock, New York. During her stay in the Colony, she created one of her most memorable prints. “Byrdcliffe” is the longest continually open arts community founded with the Arts and Crafts ethos of Ruskin and Morris, as reported in the London Sunday Times, July, 2010.
In 1983, I first visited Orkney and, in the subsequent ten years, when I found the time and space to paint more earnestly, my inspiration came from photos of that first visit. I returned to Orkney in 1994 and, again, ten more years of work relied on those photos. Changing life situations allowed more time for my painting and I began to use the studio sessions at the Woodstock School of Art more frequently with artist, Staats Fasoldt. It was his suggestion that I return to Orkney for some new inspiration and that brought me back in 2004. Numerous and various encounters with local folks quickly evolved into friendships. By 2005, these connections had produced a new summer travel art workshop venture called ORKNEY ART ADVENTURES: A Cultural Immersion and Art Workshop.
In 2010, I returned to Orkney for my first full-time winter and stayed six months at the late artist Sylvia Wishart’s home and studio. With the support of a wonderful community, I am now able to call Stromness my home.
Having taught over two hundred print workshop participants since opening, there is a pleasant harmony when thinking about this historical print technique once again being used in an Atlantic Ocean harbour town, where fishing was once highly important, where artists continue to gather, and in the country that defined Arts and Crafts as a philosophy and movement. In a reciprocal fashion, since teaching my first Provincetown Print workshop here in 2005, students of mine are now offering instruction in other parts of Scotland…an art exchange to expand both cultures!
What People Say
Jeanne, you are the best: knowledgeable, patient, and kind while offering constructive criticism. I have been ’white-lining’ every since our return from Orkney and I am someone who had never picked up a paint brush before. !
Mary — Scotland
You are one of the most inspiring people I have met in the last decade! Your art is like a warm fire in the dark of winter. And look what I found in a house in Budapest. It is one of your paintings! He was super appreciative of your work, just as I am.
George — Kenya
Orkney proved to be a very special place, welcoming, peaceful and comfortable. I can now journey back there in my mind whenever things here get out of hand. I truly felt like I had always been there.
Marty — United States
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