JANE GALLOWAY
For two decades Jane Galloway has made a name as a landscape painter and illustrator. She has designed many graphic print series for galleries and greeting cards as well as painting much loved images of Raglan and the Coromandel.
After 20 years the landscapes still require mental discipline, planning and many hours to produce. She has consequently come to see completing them as an intellectual exercise requiring certain skills which, while satisfying, don’t allow her intuition a voice.
After 4 years study with an American tutor Jane feels she has begun to find a new voice with abstraction. This was the kind of work she began at art school many years ago.
Finding her own form of expression has involved a lot of experimentation. This means beginning a work without a preconceived idea of how it might look. Some of her work is about colour – learning how to mix it, harmonise it and use the paint. It’s also about composition – how to move the eye freely around a work using a variety of tones. The more Jane has learned the more she has been able to experiment, letting go of an outcome. Some pieces take days to “arrive” at a place she thinks is complete. Others can take half an hour. It’s as much about knowing when to stop. Part of the process is about trusting that having lived a life, you have something worth expressing.
Jane’s most recent works experiment with pushing differences of control and looseness; structure and the ineffable; materiality and essence as she looks to the differences in her own personality. This has led recently to a return to combining realism with the materiality of paint. She says it’s all part of an exciting and fulfilling journey as an artist.
