Artist

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 25 years the landscapes still require mental discipline, planning and many hours to produce. Completing them has become less fulfilling as she longs for a more intuitive way of painting to expressing less defined subject matter.

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 in some of her works while others are still working towards developing her own abstract language of the sublime.