Jocelyn Claire Burke is a Canadian painter working from her studio in a Niagara Escarpment river valley north of Toronto. Jocelyn’s oil paintings are explorations in how colour and atmosphere conjure memory, sense of place, and the sublime experience of wild places. Jocelyn’s richly layered surfaces and distinct language of mark making create a forum for negotiation between colour and light, memory and event, language and interpretation, dreams and waking life.
Jocelyn’s painting practice serves to create an abstracted record of the invisible veil of emotions, thoughts, conversations, or events that translate the energy of a place or a time into the reality of experience. The atmosphere in a fleeting moment, the nostalgia for a certain quality of light, the echoes of an alternate history- even those that have been imagined and never made real- are the unseen elements that define us all, and are the muses most demanding of her creative attention.
Jocelyn Burke completed her BA in Art History and Studio Art at the University of Guelph in 2012, and earned certification in Curatorial Studies in both the Contemporary Art & Venice Biennale programs at the European Cultural Academy in Venice, Italy in 2017. In July 2019 she returned to the European Cultural Academy as a course Instructor and artist mentor. Jocelyn has exhibited in Canada and the United States, and her work is held in various private collections.
Jocelyn is also an entrepreneur, art writer and academically published essayist, author and illustrator of a children’s book, wilderness adventurer, and founder and curator of The Wild Residency