Viewing Room
Welcome to the Castle Gallery Viewing Rooms where you will find highlights from our exhibitions - past and present - focussing on key works, inspirational ideas and telling the stories behind the show. Best viewed on a desktop browser.
Jane Walker
1st - 23rd September 2023
'Light to Dark: Linocuts and Watercolours'
Still lifes inspired by Jane's personal collection of 1950s textile design and Scandinavian ceramics
'Light to Dark: Linocuts and Watercolours'
Still lifes inspired by Jane's personal collection of 1950s textile design and Scandinavian ceramics
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Mussels & Flask, linocut, 28.5 x 25.5cm
Imagine creating a picture in your head, starting first with light colours and then slowly building up layers of increasingly darker colours until the composition is complete, balanced and beautiful. Now, consider how you might do this with a piece of linoleum.
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Jane Walker, an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers, is an enthusiastic exponent of the reduction linocut technique. This involves cutting each colour layer from the same block of lino. Part of the design is cut into the lino and printed, and then successive layers are also cut away and printed, each layer representing a different, increasingly darker colour. The whole edition is printed at the same time starting from the lightest colour to the darkest, and so by the final colour all the lino has been carved away making it impossible to go back and reprint. This means that the editions are inevitably small - usually only about 12.
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Mussels & Sea, watercolour, 20 x 18cm
Jane's paints beautifully fluent watercolour sketches to explore colour and composition as a prelude to the printmaking process. These paintings are an integral part of her work. They are approached the same way as her linocuts working from light to dark, using the paint both as transparent and opaque. The paintings allow for more subtle colour combinations and finer detail.
She says: “These paintings have become more central to my work and I enjoy the pleasure of painting now in its own right. I find that the two work together and nourish each other.”
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Pear & Shell, watercolour, 18 x 16cm - Daffodils, watercolour, 13 x 13cm - Red Moon & Figs, watercolour, 20 x 18cm
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Leaf & Cherry, linocut, 15 x 15cm
Jane’s prints and paintings reveal a fascination with still life, exploring the relationship between objects and space and trying to achieve a balanced composition through intersecting line, shape and colour. The process of linocut encourages simplification and abstraction. Jane’s approach is quite graphic and this reflects her design background.
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Jane studied illustration and printmaking at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee before following a career as a designer in textiles and ceramics in Porto. She then became Creative Director of Graphic Design at the BBC in London.
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Orange Tulips, linocut, 28.5 x 25.5cm
She has now come full circle and returned to her first love, printmaking. Jane uses the reduction linocut technique to produce handmade, limited edition prints from her studio in rural Perthshire.
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Red Spotted Vase, linocut, 28.5 x 25.5cm
The richness of her palette and her strong graphic sensibility reflect her love of 20th century artists and craftsmen, 1950s textile design and Scandinavian ceramics. Her heroes include Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Mary Fedden, Ben Nicolson, Robert Taverner, Eric Ravillious, Enid Marx, Stig Lindberg, Elizabeth Friedlander, John Piper, William Scott and Patrick Heron.
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Almost Blue, linocut, 28.5 x 25.5cm - Shell & Striped Mug, linocut, 28.5 x 25.5cm - Beetroot & Tulips, linocut, 28.5 x 25.5cm