About Jeanne Bouza Rose

If you ever get to know me, you will understand why I write a narrative instead of a formal résumé or curriculum vitae.

Having worked with young children for over 30 years, I know that everyone starts out being an artist and I know that for ever so many, that belief does not last long. So many first graders will say, "Can you draw this for me? I can’t. I am not an artist." Funny, isn’t it? Not a single child ever says, "Can you speak for me? I can’t. I am not a speaker." So, somewhere very early on, each of us accepts the loss of what is innate to us all. I think there is a great chance that it really doesn’t disappear. It just gets buried.

Luckily for me, art has been a thread throughout my life. It has spiraled through many forms and brought me in touch with many crafts and challenges. As an elementary school educator in an enrichment program (gifted and talented for ALL students) for most of my teaching career, I know the value of curiosity. I also know that I do not and will never have right answers. I continually ask questions of myself and my students.

Discovery is the thread that weaves my life as an artist. Adventure can lead to discovery. So when I was selected for a Fulbright exchange teaching program in Paisley, Scotland, I was destined to discover. Not everything I explored became fully realized during my year abroad. My life certainly changed, and I mark my life before and after that year in Scotland. It was the year that I met people who would help bring me closer to my life as an artist. And it was the year I first set foot on the Scottish islands of Orkney.

For years after that visit, I first played with and then developed the idea of taking my love of sky and undulating landscape and crossing it with the shapes of the powerful standing stones I had seen on Orkney. Today, when I look at the photos I used for inspiration and compare them to the paintings, I am amazed at the differences. Something was inside the land in Orkney that reached out and touched me. It released me from false constraints and freed me to find my own ideas of colors and beauty.

An artistic awareness began to flow that matched the variability of the Orkney terrain. I became more alive. What I was so used to seeing as humdrum became sources of beauty and pleasure, and I started painting with greater interest, took more classes and met more helpful people.

With the experience of becoming a learner again, there has been an uncovering of the self. It is the self that we all share…that of the artist. If one can remember how to see, then wherever one looks, there is the art of the artist. I am so happy that what I have seen, looked at, and then painted is able to bring pleasure to an audience broader than, my family, my two dogs (Dougal and Guinness), and me.

There must be something in the land of the standing stones, its sky, and its wind. Or perhaps it really is inside each of us. It just takes the right moment, the right place, and maybe the right person or two, for all the forces to meet and grow with strength. With that strength comes the power to fly forward and to go where one might never otherwise have imagined was possible.

If my artwork through the galleries in New York, the café in Sedona, the art shows in the New York Hudson Valley, or on my websites, touches you, please be assured that I am filled with gratitude for your pleasure. For more information about me, various media publications, and my Cultural Immersions Workshops on Orkney, please go to workshops and testimonials

I look forward to our contact, for the "Artworks of the Earth" are only ours to share.

Jeanne