Jayne Sandys Renton

Jayne says: “I am a painter. I love the material quality of paint. I use photographs to paint from, but painting takes the work beyond the fixed moment in time and the imagination does the rest.”

“My work explores the figure, predominantly the female form, physically and psychologically. The subject matter for my work began on my M.A course at West Dean where I explored the work and life of Francesca Woodman. Following this I collaborated with the poet Stephanie Norgate, exploring the relationship of a figure within the place they inhabit; this was in response to Stephanie’s poems giving each place a voice in her writing.”

“Currently my work responds to intimate photographs I have taken of my family. The paintings are large, the brush marks expressive. I want the viewer to be aware of the surface. When I took the photographs I asked each person to have a private conversation with the lens; I want the viewer to have their own conversation with the painting.”

In 2008 Jayne began studying the contemporary American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) whose self-portraits reflect a growing bodily awareness and sexuality mixed with spirituality and innocence, within formal compositions that are direct yet enormously subtle. Jayne produced paintings that were a conversation, or even collaboration, with this young artist who she’d never met. The work has many compositional similarities, but there it stops, as Jayne used Woodman’s images to investigate a broader sense of the environment and womanhood.

In 2009 Jayne has been developing a new theme in the work – space. This was introduced when she started to collaborate with the poet Stephanie Norgate, and began to place figures within the buildings and spaces that they’d visited. One such space is a Runcton folly tower, on a hill near Funtington, a space that has an eerie atmosphere combined with a real sense of history. Sometimes Jayne would include lines from Stephanie’s poems, making the work conversational as well as introspective.

The most recent of Jayne’s works come from photos taken in a French forest that had been stripped bare by a forest fire. This was an extraordinary place made of charcoal; and within it is a young woman, looking white and vulnerable as she moves and merges with the charred fir trees. Through expressive line (including lots of charcoal) and texture, these paintings investigate the relationship between this extraordinary space and this young woman.