My story

In my early 20s I spent six months on a Three Dimensional Design course at Norwich City College of Art – the only formal art training I have had. I was also influenced by the fact that my mother painted, as a fairly gifted amateur with an interesting naive style, through all her adult life. My father also took up painting, in his retirement. When my parents passed on I inherited both their collection of art books and materials (brushes especially) as well as a small collection of original artwork.

After college on my twenties in the late 1970s I painted mostly mandalas – geometrical and symmetrical designs, usually with specific meanings and symbolism. At the time I was influenced by patterns and numerology, and sacred geometry in particular. I used magic squares, magic lines, golden sections and vesica piscis, as the groundwork for a number of works. I tended to use carefully drawn pencil and Rotring pen line frameworks on paper or card and later infill them in gouache. I also experimented with silk screen, lino-cut and woodblock printing at this time. Another line of exploration was imaginative psychedelic flights of fantasy in ink and gouache.

Eventually I started a job making English Oak 17th Century style furniture in a small workshop in Norfolk, England. Later I moved through building joinery (doors/windows/staircases/house construction) and ended up as a specialist wood turner making bobbins for lacemaking and spindles for hand spinning. Many of these are around to be seen on Instagram, Pinterest or changing hands sometimes on Ebay. I have lived most of my life as a self-employed craftsman in wood, as a means of earning my living, which left little time or energy for art.

So until my own retirement from self-employed business, the productive time of my life in relation to art was in my early twenties. After retirement in 2018 I started little by little to experiment with naturalistic painting, at least stylised water colours. I started in Bali when on holiday painting small impressions of my surroundings in the rice-fields of Sayan. During later trips to Bali I became fascinated partly by the lush tropical plants and flowers, but also the symbolism and iconography expressed particularly in sculpture and religious forms, and the richness and intensity of colours that surround you.

This is everywhere in Bali, so ubiquitous, often the subjects are deities from the Hindu pantheon, perhaps mythical beasts like the Barong (part lion part bear part imagination). Real animals and human figures also occur. So as well as painting images to convey Balinese vegetation and landscape, in a a stylised way, I have also done work based on dance and gamelan performances. My work includes representational pieces closely modelled on an actual scene, such as The Garuda Bird. Some pieces take the essence of a scene or performance and attempt to capture the spirit of the moment in a stylised manner (The Pandawas is an example here The Pandavas (original artwork)).

Techniques

At college I was taught to draw in in pencil and charcoal. In the 1970s/1980s I used ink and gouache for the most part with a little in acrylic on plywood. When re-starting with art from 2019 I started with watercolour and soon moved into mostly acrylic on canvas.

Recently I have been exploring colour and form in a much looser semi-representational or even freeform style. I was introduced to the technique of gel-block monotype printing while in Bali in 2020 and quickly started to use it in exploratory ways. Some works have emerged from playing with colour on the gel block, taking prints and then developing the results and developing them further. An example here is Rain Forest which started life as a gel-block print using water-colour, and was then developed with Derwent Inktense pencil, overlay washes and fine-liner pens. Some works have explored gel-block printing only as a medium, often applying multiple print impressions to the same image in layers, which draws to an extent on batik techniques. For some works I have taken the gel print as a start point for further work.

I have produced a sequence of works using collage techniques, both traditional cut paper and glue methods as well as digital collage. The latter is especially interesting to me for the variation and shifts possible through image processing in art apps such as ArtSet or Snapseed, and even the standard range of image editing available on an iPad or iPhone. Some works from 2022 started with a physical collage derived from several different gel prints, then taking that image forward into the digital realm and producing a sequence of variants from it. Examples of this technique are here, follow the link below for more.

These images combine gel-block prints in acrylic (6 images) cut up and collaged, then digitally edited.

https://maisie-jane-art.com/product-category/prints/digcoll/

Influences

In Bali I stay regularly at Santra Putra, a guest house and gallery run by a well known and influential Ubud artist Wayan Karja. This gallery and guest house is a magnet for other artists who sometimes come to do artist-in-residence. There I met an Australian artist and printmaker Aesha Kennedy who introduced me to gel plate monotype printmaking. I couldn’t wait to engage with this and ordered one right away. This technique opened up an entirely new way of working for me. To start getting colour onto media without lots of pre planning, even just being random and experimental, produced some very interesting and unexpected results.

Another artist I met in Ubud, Rekha Menon (Kuala Lumpur) has been influential in encouraging my self-development and self-belief as an artist. Her bold use of colour has also drawn me to use stronger and more intense palettes.

*influences – people 

*influences – some artists I really love

  • Monet
  • Matisse
  • Miro
  • William Morris
  • And the surrealists in general

*influences  – books

  • The substantial art library my mother bequeathed to me, plus
  • Projective Ornament (P 1915) Claude Bragdon From the 1890s to the 1930s, Claude Bragdon enjoyed an international reputation as an architect, designer, and critic working in the progressive tradition associated with Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Prairie School. In 1915 Bragdon created “projective ornament,” a system of geometric patterns designed to serve as a universal form-language integrating not only architecture, art, and design, but also a society divided by differences of class, gender, religion, culture, and national origin. https://vdocument.in/claude-bragdon-projective-ornament-1915.html
  • City of Revelation (P 1972) John Michell This book delves into topics such as sacred geometry, numerology and the esoteric concept of New Jerusalem, the prophetic city centred on the rebuilt Holy Temple of Jerusalem. John Michell was an English author and esotericist, best known for his contribution to the development of the Earth mysteries movement. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24373474M/City_of_revelation

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