Jeanne Variell Stott Chippendale
March 9, 1925 - August 25, 2019
Jeanne was born in Golden, Colorado to Helen Variell Cole and Charles Edwin Stott. Prior to her mother’s death from tuberculosis when she was four, Jeanne was sent to live with her maternal grandparents, Ina and Walter Scott Cole, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she would grow up. In Grand Rapids, Jeanne attended Davis Technical High School. Her coursework there in aeronautics initiated a lifelong love of flying. While at Davis, she also revealed her talent as a mezzo-soprano. Excelling in music, she would later enter Michigan State University as a voice major.
While on break from college and visiting her father in Mexico City in 1947, Jeanne was introduced to Arthur J. Chippendale Jr. They married the following year in New York City, moving shortly thereafter to southern California, where they took up residence in the college town of Claremont. They remained in Claremont, where they raised their two sons, Arthur and Christopher, for the next twenty years.
Jeanne’s personality and several talents opened many doors for her. Ever active and outgoing in the communities she lived in, she worked as a newspaper reporter, a designer/illustrator and an elementary school art teacher. She was an avid reader and pursued a path of lifelong learning. In the 1960’s, she studied art under Sister Corita Kent at Immaculate Heart College, in Los Angeles. Later, she entered the BFA program at California State University, Long Beach, earning her degree in sculpture in 1980. Over the next thirty years she produced dozens of works in bronze, stone, ceramics and wood, as well as numerous paintings, drawings and 2D mixed media pieces. Never one to sit still, Jeanne was also an avid gardener. She built and left behind beautiful domestic landscapes wherever she lived.
For more than twenty years, until her late-seventies, Jeanne taught English as a second language to hundreds of mostly Japanese and Korean students. During this same period, she acquired a strong interest in the practice of Buddhism and the spiritual aspects of faith. She became an ordained minister in 1986.
Jeanne was a fiercely independent person. She competed against boys as a young girl and became, in the late 60’s, a strong supporter of Women’s Rights. When her marriage to Arthur fell apart in 1972, she found a new love in Erma “Norene” Monroe and moved from Claremont to Hollywood. They would spend the next thirty-eight years living together in southern California. Norene passed in 2016.
Jeanne’s own passing occurred at Newton-Wellesley Center for Alzheimer’s Care in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she had been lovingly cared for since 2011. She was 94. She leaves behind her two loving sons, Arthur Joseph Chippendale III of Vashon Island, Washington, and Christopher Charles Chippendale of Cambridge, Massachusetts; their spouses: Tania Kinnear and Elisabeth Mitchell; five grandchildren: Chloe, Julian, Alex and David Chippendale and Chris Kinnear; and three great-grandchildren. Her compassion and strength touched a great many lives. She will be remembered by many.
A memorial celebration of Jeanne’s life will be planned in the future.