Jane Strother 2020

As a studio landscape painter, I devise and build a final image through many stages and layers of paint away from the location. Initially, an arrangement of forms or motifs informed by quick drawings made on site (recording look, feel, energy) and importantly, of integrity to the subject, are established. The work is resolved through construction (and deconstruction) of composition, colour, mark-making and abstraction.
This adherence to the ‘truth’ can prompt marked differences in my work from one series to another, in choice of colour palette, of scale and mass, of mark. I am excited by composition, colour proportion and value relationships,the quality of a mark and its location, the palpable nature of the painted surface.

Subjects are frequently found at the coast or hill country, the more 'weather' the better. A life time's enthusiasm for topography, natural habitat and wild life, particularly botany, suggests the detail in an image.
The ongoing Fragile Habitats series is informed by such observation. The work records a personal response to fragile ecologies (land/sea margins, threatened green belt) as well as more domesticated environments.
The land/sea margins work is about the mudflats and shingle beaches of the less well-known Essex and Suffolk coast and some of the hardy plants (Sea Pea, Sea Lettuce...) that grow there. A growing angle to my work is an interest in the human footprint on such habitats, for good or for worse and exemplified in 'Ordinary Landscapes', an exhibition (2012) about the habitats of orchids indigenous to the UK.

I have exhibited widely in Bath, Bristol, Cambridge, London and Oxford in group and solo shows, most recently in the 2017 National Open Art exhibition on London's South Bank and selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. An annual event is the Oxfordshire Visual Arts Festival or Artweeks. This year is my 26th consecutive year of opening my studio.