Thoughts

I passionately believe that to be inspired, one needs to find not only the beauty inherent in the land and sky, but to also learn the history of place and the people who have been nurtured by it and its soil.

Since 2011, I have volunteered with the Ness of Brodgar archaeology project. The Neolithic marks and objects discovered there have influenced my recent artwork.

I was very young when I started mixing my mother’s paints and fell in love with the smell of turpentine.  As an early dabbler, I tried many methods of colour making and media. Then, after a year of living in Scotland in the 80s and my first visit to Orkney, the inspiration for my work changed. I began to use the colour and the shape of the land I saw outside my window, punctuated with the verticals of the standing stones of Orkney.

I continue to be irresistibly drawn to the landscape, cloudscape, skyscape, and standing stone “scape” of Orkney. The Orkney landscape, rich in colour, texture, and design has helped my artistic awareness to flow. I paint and print with different materials which I think reflects the variability of the Orkney terrain, the history, the lives of people, and its standing stones.

I passionately believe that to be inspired one needs to find not only the beauty inherent in the land and sky, but to also learn the history of the place and the people who have been nurtured by it and its soil. Since 2011, I have volunteered with the Ness of Brodgar archaeology project. The Neolithic marks and objects discovered there have influenced my recent artwork.

Sometimes I take the sense of an Orkney landscape and bring it to wherever I stay still long enough to paint. Thus, you will find that my work can include landscapes of the hills and waters of North America, the home I started at. Trees take the place of standing stones along landscapes of the Hudson River, the Finger Lakes, and the Catskills of New York.  Wherever I am, colour makes me smile. Trees or stones? Both of them link the world I paint.

Jeanne Bouza Rose