Jeanne Urban was born in the mid 1950s in Northern Ontario and raised in a small mining town. As a teenager she was taught to paint worn out old miners’ boots by a fiercely independent woman with blazing red lips and a long cigarette holder.

Denied a career in art, she became a registered nurse, an assistant to a cardiologist and eventually managing disability operations in Alberta for a large insurance carrier. She continued to paint intermittently in oil and pastels, taking courses as time allowed until retirement when she immersed herself in one oil painting course and workshop after another for several years. She continues to learn every day.

She has been juried into the Federation of Canadian Artists and has sold work through their Vancouver shows. Urban exhibits at the Apik Fine Art Gallery as a member of the Collective and with the Passionate Painters Art Group.

Urban still paints in oil, loving the smell and luscious texture, getting her fingers dirty to soften edges and blend colours or using a knife to add texture when the brush can’t do the job. Our magnificent country offers far too much beauty to not paint the world around her and so her primary focus is landscape art, varying her style as the landscapes asks her to and painting night skies that allow her to throw colour just about anywhere on the canvas with big bold brush strokes while still pretending at realism. She does commissioned portraits, mostly of children and of pets. Fully dedicated to her art she paints daily in her home studio and en plein air and continues independent study and workshops with internationally known artists.