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Jane Birrell MacKenzie

Born in Hamilton and raised in Carluke, Jane now lives in Catterline near Stonehaven, NE Scotland and currently shares her time between here and her French home. Her professional Art teaching career spanned some 32 years in Aberdeen and The Middle East, and she enjoyed challenging roles during this time working with senior pupils on their way into the Creative Industries. She also worked as an Oil Painting and Fashion Textiles Adjunct Lecturer in The American University of Dubai and The Canadian Colleges of Higher Technology, Abu Dhabi.

In 2013 she resigned from teaching to concentrate on her own practice and has developed a distinctive, expressive colourist style. She has been featured in The Leopard (Scottish Field magazine, Vougue, Tatler and Country & Town House luxury lifestyle magazines. 

"I am always influenced by places lived in, or passed through and by memories and associations drawn from, and collected by, observing the landscape in all it's forms, atmospheres and weathers. I have built a reputation for my expressive work and have paintings in private collections world wide. My degree in woven and knitted textiles informs what I do, as I use rich textural effects and layered colour. I always look to 'pull out' the colours I see in the landscape: in rock formations, patchwork fields, seascapes and beaches."

More recently, having spent the last five years living in Dubai UAE, she has joined groups of artists working en plein air in the wadis and mountainious regions of the UAE, close to the Omani boarder in locations near to Ras al Kaimah, Fujairah and Dibba. These experiences further honed her abilities in directly observed landscape painting. Current paintings reflect both intuitive approaches, abstraction and explorations of surface applications in oils.