She has taught her unique approach to painting and drawing, which “unites the body, mind and spirit”, to over 2,000 students. In a part of the gallery called the Eden Centre she conducts workshops “enabling individuals to embody the miracle of his or her own creative power.” But just as important is continuing her own work. Her paintings, usually in watercolour and often part of a series, are awash with colour and seem to cross the threshold between the physical and spiritual world, whether it be a depiction of the Kama Sutra or a haunting Winter Moon. She chooses watercolour precisely because its softness best suits her exploration of the physical and spiritual world around us.   Her early years saw Jeanne raised in the puritanical atmosphere encouraged by a loving but strict Baptist Italian family in New Jersey. The Eros Woman

Kama Sutra Her father was an auto mechanic. Her mother Annie, who is still alive, remains a good-natured critic (“she likes my flowers but she is still not sure about the nudes!”). Of her childhood Jeanne recalls: “I was raised as a Baptist and unfortunately I took it seriously. My experience of growing up was that I went very quickly to always worrying about what other people wanted me to do. I didn’t want to make a mess. “When I was five I had rheumatic fever and I was very ill. I faced my mortality at a very early age and because of that I have always had a very strong sense that this life is a very short one and we don’t want to waste it doing what is meaningless to us. “My goal all of my life has been to do what is really meaningful and not to waste time doing what is not giving meaning to life.” Her creativity began manifesting itself when she was just three. She began painting, drawing and making things. But to her parents her desire to express her creativity was regarded as an oddity: “It was something that was just thought of by my parents as one of those weird things that Jeanne did. “I was from a working class family, no-one had gone to college and we didn’t really see art as something real people did. “Making it my life took a long time. I had planned on majoring in some form of art in college but that was frowned upon by my parents and I eventually chose English because literature is another artform.”

Page 4     Waking-Up Magazine Issue 1      September-December 2000

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