M. Jane Rowe

St. Mary's County

Painter

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Art requires continual sustenance from the exterior world. I like to take the chaos of light, shadow, color, and ideas and create some order by capturing it all on a canvas in a way that sends a message to the viewer. Painting is my way of expressing universal ideas about life and the complexity of the human experience [life, death, happiness], or something as simple as the way sunlight falls on a wooden floor. My painting style is representational and grounded in the academic studio tradition. I am challenged by the problems of turning the elements of the physical world into painterly effects, light and shadow (chiaroscuro), creating illusions, and what makes art function as message in an external world. 


The objects in my recent work are birds’ nests, bones and toys. Traditionally, bones represent death, remembrance, and other means of the passage of life and time. My bone paintings explores and challenges perceived ideas of beauty and symbols. Toys are typically viewed as objects of child’s play. The toy paintings explore symbolism, relationships, and context. I am interested in challenging traditional ideas by depicting these symbols/bone/toy-objects not as content, but as pure form, defined within the context of extreme light, shadow, and placement in ambiguous space. By doing so, I encourage the viewer to re-think values, beauty, relationships and symbols in new ways.