“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.“

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

about j.e. paterak

Jeanne, is a studio artist living and working in Portland, Maine. She has multiple disciplines as a studio metalsmith and jeweler, and as a painter and also is a curator and writer. Her career began as a painter and printmaker at Massachusetts College of Art and she later studied metalsmithing and jewelry at Cranbrook Academy of Art just outside of Detroit, Michigan.

She is a bit of an itinerant maker, strongly aligned with walking and adventuring in the field with fellow avocational & professional botanists and mycologist. Her studies have allowed her to also study at Cooper Union, and in Eastern Europe in the 1980s just ahead of the fall of the Berlin wall. She has both taught and studied at Haystack and Penland. She has exhibited throughout the country over the decades long career but ideally loves to remain in Maine.

Her paintings and jewelry are in numerous private collections throughout the country as well as in public collections, most notably at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Both her writing and work have been published in American Craft, Metalsmith and Ornament magazines Art New England, as well as numerous books. She has been awarded grants from Maine Arts Commission, as well as residencies at Monson Arts, Haystack, Hewnoaks, The Fiore Center (mogfa), Bowdoin’s Kent Island Science Station among others.

She is a co-owner with her husband Keith Fitzgerald of Zero Station which for 26 years (24 years in East Bayside Portland Maine) it was knowns as an independent gallery with a legacy of innovative programing and social discourse. In June of 2026, the gallery closed its doors. They continue to do some art consulting and Keith continues his work as a fine woodworker doing custom framing and digital printing.

When Jeanne is not working in her studio she is enjoying the four seasons on trails near and far, often on her knees photographing something tiny and wonderous, or foraging, digging in the earth to harvest matsutake in the fall duft of hemlock or picking berries trailsidein the heat of summer. She looks longingly at other’s well-tended gardens and is learning to love the imperfect re-wilded half-acre of native “weeds” in her yard and the creatures it brings. Her creative children have fled the nest and are making a better world, from their own respective nests.