Jane Lovett Wells

BIO

“There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.”
– Edward Hopper

I am a seventh generation Texan who has drawn and painted all my life. I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin.

The bright Texas sun has become part of me. Natural light on buildings, water, highways and weeds inspires me to paint. When I notice summer sun cooking asphalt or the low winter sun casting long shadows across an auditorium wall, I am jolted into imagining what the scene would look like as a painting.

My choices of subject matter, the parking lots, cafe chairs, highways and sheds are not what most folks would think is pretty. I don’t have anything against pretty, and I do in fact think that weeds in the afternoon light beside the road are pretty, but it is just not the sentimental prettiness of a place that draws me in. Similarly, I am not drawn in by a story or a narrative. I do not choose highway overpasses as subject matter because they are primary symbols of modern civilization, not consciously at least, but because the shadows under them are beautiful.

It is fun to remove as much as I can from a landscape, getting it all on the canvas and then taking out everything that is not necessary. The images become commonplace, encouraging the viewer to create their own narrative. I enjoy hearing the narrative that viewers create from their own experience.”I have been on that highway. I remember it.” Of my current paintings, the ones in this exhibition, I have heard, “They are so peaceful, almost like looking toward eternity.”

The title of the show, About the Edge, refers to my attention to the lines where two colors or shapes meet, sometimes slightly overlapping. A fellow artist observed, “Your paintings are all about the edges. The thing I like most about your paintings are the edges.”

Studying the work of many painters inspires me. Included in this show are three studies of Dutch Baroque artist Jan Vermeer. In creating these arrangements of colored squares I am trying to learn something from Vermeer. Why are his compositions so pleasing? My habit is to arrange five canvases on easels at the perimeter of my studio. I move back and forth, painting on all five over the course of several weeks. I might mix a turquoise on my palette for a Vermeer interior and then use the same color for a distant highway and for the light through water at Lake McQueeney. I also look at Richard Diebenkorn and Edward Hopper. My teacher, Charles Field, taught me to do this. He guided his students to study art history, looking at the work of other painters all the time to continue to learn from them.