Tampa Bay Metro Magazine

Tampa Painter, Jeanne Cameron

Jeanne Cameron, Morning Glory Triptych

Through May 29, Clayton Galleries celebrates 25 years of exhibiting fine art with a showcase of work by the nearly 30 artists represented by the South Tampa gallery.

Numbering among them is Jeanne Cameron, a Tampa-based painter whose work bridges the digital divide to fuse traditional oil painting techniques with illustration and graphic design. In her paintings and digital prints, she combines mandala-like layers of pattern with realistic images to create visions of natural harmony.

Cameron's art reflects her multi-faceted background as a painter trained at the University of South Florida's MFA program, graphic designer and long-time teacher of art, design and color theory. Works like Care for the Earth #6, an all-digital print on view at Clayton Galleries, convey a sense of nature's order by employing both realistic

images of fauna and flora and abstract arrangements of shape and color. In West Window, a newly completed oil painting that Cameron designed digitally before painting by hand, she reinterprets one of the rose windows inside Washington National Cathedral.

Since her undergraduate education during the tumultuous 1970s, Cameron has explored the idea of harmony through visual form, she says. Her artful symmetry and use of natural symbols are ways of combating discord through images.

"For me the color, patterns and the harmony just want to express some kind of unity—maybe even happiness," Cameron says.

For more information about Jeanne Cameron, visit online at www.jeannecamerongraphics.com.

The exhibition "Now and Then, Clayton Galleries, 25 Years" continues through May 29 at Clayton Galleries, 4105 South MacDill Avenue, Tampa. For more information, call 813-831-3753 or visit www.claytongalleries.net.

—Megan Voeller

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