Jane Gardiner is an oil painter and printmaker based in Glasgow, originally from Ayrshire. A passionate drawer from an early age, she later pursued a career in science and became a GP partner in Glasgow’s East End in 2009. That same year, she began exhibiting her oil paintings and has since shown regularly in open competitions across Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London, including the BP Portrait Award, as well as in several solo exhibitions.
Her work is grounded in figurative painting, with a particular fascination for movement in birds, the sea, and the imagined inner worlds of people. In recent years, Jane has found herself increasingly drawn back to the coast, a connection that deepened during the Covid restrictions and was made more accessible by advances in type 1 diabetes technology, allowing her greater freedom to explore. Much of her recent work is inspired by these coastal visits, often in brisk Scottish sunshine, and by the people she encounters there.
The growing popularity of wild swimming - or simply “going for a swim,” as she knew it in childhood - reflects a wider return to the sea, yet many coastal places still feel remote and untamed, the kind of landscape where selkies might belong. Like many, she sometimes suspects she may have a little selkie blood herself.