Watercolours – Enamels – Calligraphy

Jill Amos Raine was born in England and has lived in Bermuda since early childhood.

In 1961 she was awarded the Bermuda Government Scholarship to study teaching at Edge Hill College, an Education Campus of the University of Liverpool, in England. Whilst there she majored in Sociology, Art and Craft, specializing in pottery and calligraphy with bookbinding. After an interesting career in teaching in Bermuda, Spain and the Canadian Arctic, she turned her attention to enamelling, and settled down to pursue art more seriously.

Entirely self-taught, she became a professional enamellist and sold her work with considerable success in England, Spain, Jamaica, the United States and Bermuda. To date she has sold countless thousands of pieces of enamelled copper jewellery.

Simultaneously, she started to explore other media and began working with pastels. In London, she was commissioned to do several portraits.

In 1983, she took a watercolour workshop with Carl Schmulz, an American artist then visiting Bermuda. Enthralled by this particular medium, she has subsequently gone on to produce innumerable paintings depicting various aspects of Bermuda’s natural beauty. Since then, she has studied painting techniques under such prominent American artists as Jim Scott and Cecile Johnson; and has worked with leading British painters Tom Coates and Bill Pickering. A succession of Limited Edition prints has helped her to become a very successful and collectible artist whose popularity reaches to both sides of the Atlantic.

She has undertaken many commissions and has received a variety of awards and honours. She was invited to produce the original painting for the official print for Bermuda’s 375th Anniversary Celebrations; she has been named ‘Artist of the Year’ and, in 1990, one of her paintings was presented to the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

Of her own work, she says: “I am forever fascinated by the brilliance and clarity of Bermuda’s colours and can find something to paint at every turn.”

Widely travelled, she has sat with soapstone carvers in the Arctic and has watched silversmiths in the Sahara; she has looked at wood carvings in Siberia and ceramics in the Middle East.