Jane Askey

JANE ASKEY is a British painter exploring ideas through a range of media.

Two years ago she moved to Fife in Scotland and her studio looks across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh, the sea view inspiring many new paintings.

Jane  graduated from Manchester Polytechnic with a degree in Printed Textiles and subsequently worked as a freelance textile designer and lecturer. She taught and inspired university students for thirty years, combining this with a career in painting and designing. She was a full time lecturer at Scottish College of Textiles/ Heriot Watt University for 15 years and since 2006 a part-time university lecturer (Nottingham Trent University, De Montfort University, Staffordshire University, Huddersfield University, Cleveland College of Art, Northampton and University York St John).

Jane’s original paintings have been exhibited in galleries throughout the UK. She travels widely and sketches on location, experimenting with drawing and painting using mixed media in response to the landscape, the coast and architecture. Her background in textile design is evident in her approach to organising composition, colour and texture.

“Not quite knowing the outcome of each new painting is the spur that drives me to create. I feel an excitement when beginning to paint, there is an urgency to start and see where the painting process of observing, experimenting and interpreting takes me. The process also involves questioning whether I have communicated the feeling of a place or thing and I work away until I find it through the handling of the media”.

Jane paints most days either outside on location or in her studio working from sketchbooks and photographs using a range of media on gesso wooden panels, canvas and paper. Daily walks inspire new ideas and provides thinking time and the opportunity to discover new subject matter. Sometimes the simplest everyday view can provide an exciting new beginning for a painting.

Drawing on location records these initial thoughts and observations. Working outside over the years has helped her to inject more energy and spontaneity into her mark making exploring the physical quality of the medium, allowing the gestural brush marks to suggest where land and sea meet with an emphasis on exploring colour, texture and light to evoke the character and mood of a specific place. Sketching on location generates a body of references to develop fully when back in the studio. She explores the physical qualities of paint and the choice of media and the different handling of paint affect her approach.

Jane travels widely throughout the UK and beyond. She has a fascination with remote islands and she is particularly drawn to the Greek Cyclades and the Scottish Outer Hebrides, which she discovered in the 1990s and to which she returns as often as she can.