Jane Brookes

Although my paintings are inspired by real places, they are more evocative than specific. They are based on recollections of specific locales, ideas about certain times. They are hidden places revealed by memory and imagination.

I want my images to be real enough to remind us where we are in relation to nature, but they must also be seen as paintings, creative artifacts. My images contain no representations of man made, hand made objects nor do they bear any reference to man’s interference with land. Yet, they are painted by hand, on structures taken from nature and built by hand.

My images are primarily about the strength of nature which is beginning to show the signs of human interference. They often portray turbulent weather or elements created by natural environmental effects: wide skies stretching over distant hills moments after a storm has broken and sun filters through broken clouds.

There is a force found in the light that I want the viewer to experience. The effect colour has on the onlooker is central to my painting. I want to trigger their emotions and connect them to the sky and the land.

There is a strong sensitivity to the horizon in my work, perhaps because I have spent my life living on Vancouver’s hillsides, looking out at the line that divides Howe Sound from

the strips of land and sky above it.

Regardless of where my glance is cast, my eyes seek the horizon yet my imagination, my dreams seek what may be found beyond it.

I am an artist that craves simplicity, beauty and, above all the ability of visual expression to move me.

Beauty arouses joy while the sublime arouses awe and admiration. My landscapes tend to speak for the evocative nature that was captured by the 19th century European Romantic painters, the artist’s of the Hudson River School and the simplified colour-field compositions of Mark Rothko.

I use rich colours to extract seductive moods and the ceaseless motion of time. They seize the shifting obscurities of a passing moment, a day or a season when light conditions are changing: the haziness of a summer day, the half light of warm dusk or the instant before rain falls. Each image captures the infinite captures the all important element of mood itself – light.

My Landscapes are more that a literal depiction of Nature, they are therapeutic outpourings of memories and emotions. They are narratives about who I am and my constant journey of self discovery.

-Jane Brookes.

My paintings are comprised of dozens of thin layers of pigment painted over a primary base of deep red. When overlapped, these layers provide a sense of peering into depths of colour, much like layering many pieces of coloured cellophane. Because of this technique, I paint on wood as it provides a smooth, mirror like surface that not only protects the fragile paint it allows me the freedom to sand away layers to allow colours from below to re-surface.

Often, my paintings will change in appearance depending on the light conditions in which they are displayed. When lit by natural light, they will take on the mood of the day as it progresses from morning to night. The more light shone on the painting, the more the deeper layers of colour will refract providing deeper, more intense tones.

Mandy Boursicot and I met during our years at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. We shared studio space at the school and, after graduation, continued to work and support each other in our separate careers. Our exhibition at Wallace Galleries, entitled “Illusions of Reality” is our first together. It is based on our practice of looking at real places or real objects and recreating these images as our own.

We hope viewers will see these paintings and connect them with their own memories and illusions of reality.