Jane Booth

Jane Booth

Earth Water Sky

I start each morning in the studio, sitting on a sofa looking out big glass doors to the southeast, overlooking a field of mixed grasses with a small spring fed pond in the center. The pond is a constant, but different every day. Sometimes the wind blows across, rippling the water. When it’s still, the water is reflective. It freezes, sparkles in the sun and thaws. Eagles fly over nearly every day. In March a cacophony of migrating blackbirds comes in droves, landing on the cattails that surround the pond. Ducks fly into the wind, cup their wings and touch down on the water feet first. Many deer move east to west in the mornings and reverse in the evenings and a hawk family hunts the south meadow every day. The field greens up, frogs start singing, an occasional coyote lopes by. In late summer the prairie grasses rise and begin to turn, sunflowers bloom, winds shift, migrations begin again.

In this way, all my work emerges from the earth, water and sky.

– Jane Booth

Jane Booth built her studio on the rural Kansas prairie sited to overlook the landscape and sky that inspire her. Booth paints from the inside out, from her meditation of life experiences then out, through the physical activity of pouring, pushing, and brushing paint. Her painting begins with raw canvas on the floor of her studio or outside on the concrete, where paint and water can be poured, pooled, and pushed with a broom. The atmosphere of the painting begins with color, vast and saturated or thinned and fog like. A calligraphy of gesture akin to dance informs the composition. Only later, once the canvas is up on the wall, do gestures and forms emerge evolving in conversation forming a visual language that is Booth’s alone. Large scale paintings are the norm for Booth often ranging upward of 15′.

Jane Booth’s paintings are in public collections throughout the country including: Kansas University Hospital, Kansas City, MO; Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, H& R Block World Headquarters and Hilton Hotels, as well as the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO.