Island Life: Jill Louise Campbell

Jill Louise Campbell’s art and gallery are iconic in our community. Her whimsical and ethereal paintings are striking yet relatable, leaving you with both a sense of awe and a palpable emotional connection to her work. Here on Salt Spring Island, where she’s lived since 1990, we’re lucky for the opportunity to be able to enjoy it every day. 

Dreams and music are strong influences as she intuitively interprets the world through paint, brush, canvas, and paper. While local and west coast imagery is prominently featured in her collection, Jill’s travels around the world allow us to see distant cultures through her unique depictions. Indeed, she uses a combination of materials to represent her experience, a process that Jill says, “show[s] a spontaneous wondrous world where time is collapsed to a single moment view.” It’s easy to both enjoy and appreciate her work beyond the canvas for the story it always seems to tell. 

Spending her younger years in Montreal, she was exposed to a world of culture early on. Then at 18, she moved to Europe to work as a summer student in Copenhagen before enrolling in The Sorbonne in Paris to study European Civilization. This, and a love for nature, inspired her to pursue walking experiences along The Amalfi Coast in Italy and The Chemin St Jacques in Languedoc, France, both of which are documented in her collections. Later travels through China, Tibet, and India fully launched Jill as an international artist. 

At home on Salt Spring, the Jill Louise Campbell Fine Art Gallery opened in Ganges in 1992. In the summers, the gallery is open daily and Jill can often be found greeting visitors herself, while in the winters, she enjoys painting retreats. While living here, together with her husband, they built their first home and renovated several old houses. Jill is equally comfortable painting walls and floors as she is with art paper. One can only imagine how she’s transformed her living space into its own work of art.  

Here at Hastings House, we’re fortunate to have had Jill paint several scenes of our property. You can find her work in many of our suites as well as in our heritage dining rooms. A perfect souvenir, her art cards are also for sale in our retail section at Reception. Be sure to revel in her wonderfully dreamlike visual impressions.