Jane Barnes

Jane Barnes grew up in the beautiful Cape region of South Africa. She loved to draw and paint and, even at a young age, explored different ways to depict the world around her. This passion led to many years of investigating different techniques, until in her final year of her Fine Art Studies, she realized that she did not want to put form down at all, only color. Through this journey of discovery, she found her unique voice and her own contemporary, abstract style. Each painting is a deep, spontaneous and spiritual response to the beauty and complexity of the world around her. Jane's soul sings when she paints.

After university Jane lived and painted in many different countries around the world, including the USA, Benin, Gabon, South Africa, England, Seychelles and Jamaica. These diverse and rich cultural experiences had a profound affect on her art as she found her inspiration from the different places, each with a different heartbeat, different intensity of light and different tones of color. Her experiences made her keenly aware of the complexity of the world around her, the many layers to who we are, to what we see and how we perceive it. To paint the ocean is one thing but to paint the essence of the ocean is quite another, and what about the layers of light and life below? This exploration into life and her deep appreciation of the diversity, complexity and beauty of what lies around us is what fuels the energy and passion of her paintings.

Today Jane paints from her studio in Somerset West under the beautiful Helderberg mountain range.

Her inspiration has also come from artists, who are masters of color, such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee, as well as abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyffod Still.

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art."

Léonardo da Vinci

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works, if from the head, almost nothing." 

Marc Chagall