Profile: French Flare in a Boomtown. Jackie Ramsay’s 50-Year Art Journey
You can take the artist out of Montreal, but you can’t take Montreal out of the artist. Just ask Jackie Ramsay. Even after calling Calgary home for nearly half a century, the painter still identifies strongly with her roots.
“I'm a Calgary based artist with a French flare,” she laughs.
Ramsay arrived in the West in 1979 to visit her brother and simply never left. At the time, Calgary was in the throes of an energy boom, and for a 26-year-old artist, the city felt electric. “It was wild. It was so free and open,” she recalls, noting the stark contrast from the political tensions in Quebec at the time. To her, the city offered “limitless possibilities”. The clean air, the proximity to the mountains, and the work-forward attitude of Calgarians heavily influenced her.
The High-Speed Analog Era
Ramsay quickly found her footing in local media, landing a job at CFAC—which would eventually evolve into 2&7, and later, Global Calgary.
Her broadcast career spanned the massive transition from the pure analog days into the digital age. She was an artistic chameleon, doing set painting, sign painting, and diving into the high-adrenaline world of courtroom sketching.
Preserving the Changing Inner City
In recent years, Ramsay's keen eye has turned toward Calgary’s rapidly shifting architectural landscape. Having lived in a heritage home in Crescent Heights for 36 years, she's had a front-row seat to the transformation of the inner city.
During COVID-19 dog walks, she began noticing the rapid disappearance of original character homes to make way for new builds. What started as a goal to paint 10 of these older houses blossomed into the "100 Storeys" project.
She laments the mass-produced nature of newer residential infills, noting that the meticulous craftsmanship of older homes is something "that will never happen again".
A Sanctuary of Constant Learning
Ramsay is a lifelong student. Despite knowing she wanted to be an artist since she was 12 years old, and formally studying visual communications at Dawson College, she continues to take courses to hone her skills. She regularly experiments with mediums like gouache, pastels, and her preferred summer oils.
Her backyard studio—built by her husband, Ken, about eight or nine years ago—is a chaotic but comfortable sanctuary. Unlike many modern creatives, she intentionally shuns the pressure to maintain an e-commerce or social media presence. She prefers the quiet authenticity of creating purely for herself.
“I'm painting for me,” she states plainly.
She views every canvas as a problem-solving exercise, sketching and planning compositions to find the perfect interplay of light and shape before committing to the final piece. Ironically, for an artist who is so obsessed with how light hits her subjects, her absolute favorite days to paint in her studio are cloudy ones, when the indirect lighting provides the perfect, subdued working environment.
Looking forward, Ramsay's passion remains entirely undiluted by time. She looks to art history for inspiration, hoping to emulate icons like Matisse who painted well into their 80s.
“If I lost my right hand, I'd be doing it with my left,” she says. “There'd never be anything other than art”.
Jackie and her niece Emily Beaudoin will be hosting the "Kin & Glow Art Exhibition" on April 30th at the Crescent Heights Community Centre. The event celebrates two generations of artists and a shared love of painting. Get more info and RSVP here.