Colleen Campbell was born and raised in Victoria, Edmonton and Ottawa.
She pursued post-secondary studies at Universities of Victoria, Manitoba and Central Washington State, culminated with three degrees in design and art. She taught design and drawing at Mount Royal in Calgary and had many interesting ad hoc work experiences during her travels.
She has lived in the Canadian Rockies since 1982, interrupted only by long explorations to other parts of the world – a year in New Zealand, three long trips to the Himalayas, two summers in the Canadian Arctic, and lengthy excursions to Europe, England and Scotland. In 1990, after many seasons recreating in the Rockies and the Purcell mountains, Colleen started work for wildlife researchers in Banff National Park. She spent twenty years, first studying coyotes for two years and then more than a decade on grizzly bear research in the Bow Valley and the front ranges of the central Canadian Rockies.
Experiences and learning gleaned during all her travels and work have informed her art of the past four decades. Her exhibition record has been consistent since the mid-1970s and includes work a few international locations: Japan, New Zealand, United States as well as Canada.
"The two drawings in It's About Blooming Time, Whyte Museum, 2022, linger from a body of work I did in the early 80s, related to old-fashioned flowers growing in my garden. The drawings of peonies are all large – 57cm x 38cm – on rag paper. The other series – Oriental Poppies – included large and small drawings. I referred to their colour in the title (Red Flower Series) and in the red framing of the dozen smaller drawings I made. During the 70s and 80s I travelled a lot – to the south Pacific, the Canadian Arctic and Southeast Asia. My experiences in those places led to images about how humans relate to animals – domestic, feral and wild – in their lives. Work on the flower series represented a personal retreat to familiar content from familiar places – interludes of relative predictability between adventures and all the images stimulated in faraway experiences.
Every spring, I watch for the signs that my peonies – mostly white – and poppies will present themselves for another season. Oriental poppies and peonies continue to evoke the gardens of my childhood, many images from university studies in art history and my own gardening efforts over the years."