Born in Hamilton and raised in Carluke, Jane now lives in Catterline near Stonehaven, NE Scotland and currently shares her time between here, her French home and Dubai. 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 ran interest lunchtime art tutoring groups in 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. Her work features in private collections internationally and she has a website and online social media presence. She has been featured in The Leopard (Scottish Field magazine), Vogue, Tatler and Country & Town House luxury lifestyle magazines.
She says of her art- "I am always influenced by places lived in, or passed through and by memories and associations drawn from and collected by observing the landscape and the creatures in it. I have built a reputation for my colourist work and specifically since 2007, for a series of Highland Cow portraits which have been purchased by clients around the world. These were inspired by our move into the Aberdeenshire countryside in 2006, where we found ourselves living next door to a field of these beautiful, docile animals.... I passed each day and became enthused by their amazing coats and quirky characters. My degree in woven and knitted textiles attracted me to their textural coats and I found myself painting them as if they were wall hangings.
More recently, I have further developed these techniques using other animals, land and seascapes, still life and abstract references as subjects. My time in the UAE has found me plein air painting in the mountianous regions over by the Omani border near Ras al Kaimah and Fujairah and these experiences further my abilities in directly observed landscape painting.
I love experimentation and current paintings reflect both intuitive approaches and explorations of surface applications in mixed media, from cold wax to spray paint to oils. Influences from Scotland, SW France and U.A.E can be seen in my work."