Jayé Ouellette

Jaye Ouellette has been a professional autodidactic artist for almost 40 years. She has exhibited widely in galleries in Canada, the United States and France and has had six solo shows in Toronto. Since living in Nova Scotia she has had five solo shows at public galleries. Her work was selected for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's groundbreaking exhibition 'Terroir: A Nova Scotia Survey' in 2016-2017. Her work was also included in the touring show 'Capture: Nova Scotia Realism'. Curated by Tom Smart, director of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the provincial gallery for New Brunswick and Peter Dykhuis director of the Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Curator Tom Smart said about Jaye's painting in the exhibition “The image is deep and metaphysical. It's a glorious painting".

In 2023 Ouellette's work was profiled in the well respected American publication, International Artist Magazine's 25th Anniversary issue, under the heading "Master Painters of the world". A four page article 'The Architecture of water'.

In 2022 she was invited to be a Pouch Cove Foundation artist-in-residence in Newfoundland, followed by the exhibition 'Water' at the James Baird Gallery in Pouch Cove.

Jaye has been awarded numerous grants and her work is included in many private and corporate art collections. Her commission work is extensive, including the Mulroney Complex, St. Francis Xavier University, N.S., and, most notably, the Skydome Hotel (Toronto Marriot City Centre Hotel), in Toronto. She created the annual awards for Toronto Women in Film.

Her paintings have been selected for the cover of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra program, The 'Antigonish Review' an international literary magazine. Her work has been featured in numerous art publications.

Jaye was profiled in Peter Murphy's documentary film 'Searching for Realism' in 2015 and was an invited marquee artist to participate in CBC Radio's 'Sharing the View' calendar project in 2014.

Ouellette began her artistic career in glass and was widely recognized in Canada as a contemporary architectural glass artist.

She moved from flat to three-dimensional glass then into mixed media sculpture with glass elements and then abandoned glass altogether. She started painting the human figure in Toronto but, upon moving to her home on the Ocean in Nova Scotia in 2003, felt compelled to paint the Sea.