Acrylic on canvas.
152 x 200 cm
During my Artist Residency in Italy, I was fortunate to receive painting lessons from an old prominent Italian artist called Alfredo, skilled in both egg tempura painting and sculpture. He was everything you might imagine an Italian art teacher to be; precise, firm, honest, interesting, passionate, enthusiastic and claiming to know less English than he did! He used the word 'sensation' to describe almost everything he felt was required in a successful painting. You had to feel the sensation of the flower, the landscape, the ocean. After a long 4-hour painting session of copying a scene, stroke for stroke, I came back to the studio and needed an abstracted release of my own personal sensations. And thus, the painting before you was born.
SENSATION (the lesson)
JANE THOMPSON
Jane is a professional artist based in Brisbane/Meanjin who was raised on a grazing property in the Southern Tablelands of NSW.
Her richly abstracted paintings are an expression of the dualistic nature of the every-day-visible and the felt-but-not-seen. Jane approaches the canvas with a curious reverence for the unannounced, resulting in a spirited surrender to the way in which she uses her materials. Watered-down acrylics are invited to splash and wander rebelliously across the canvas, while oil sticks and graphite are applied in raw, intuitive motions. Jane's work transpires a felt desire to reconnect and nurture a relationship with the wild and natural, in spite of a world which presses us to move further away.
"When I paint, I like to capture a moment where anything feels possible. Among the regular, orderly and sensible elements of colour and composition, I like to instigate a small riot of freedom; something a little unexpected, whether it be a colour clash or a bold strike of line to break up any notion of the situation being under control. This is the feeling I want from my paintings, to feel relieved from the predictable and alive with possibilities".
Professionally, Jane's work is held in both private and corporate collections across Australia, UK, Europe, Southeast Asia and North America.