Remembered landscapes in Greece and Scandinavia have inspired the colourful, abstract oil paintings in our latest exhibition, ‘Time Travel’.

Painted mainly at her home on the edge of the Sussex Downs, the works in oil on canvas and board reflect the sense of space she finds in these places. They are somewhere you can get away from people, although traces of former settlement remain.

“Memories are a sort of time travel. It’s my way of revisiting those places,” she says. Her use of colour is bold and unusual, and it can take her a long time to layer up the paint to achieve the effect she wants. “I choose quite strange colours because I like oddness. I don’t go for realism at all,” she explains. Her work is intuitive rather than worked out beforehand and she seeks to create a slightly disconcerting atmosphere, responding to places “because they are unsettling in one way or another”.

Many of the works conjure up memories of Greece, where she and her late partner had a tiny home in the mountains on the southernmost tip of the mainland. They used to walk there together and discover aabandoned farmsteads and old chapels. She describes them as “the ghosts of past life”, places where things were said, and experiences had that remain in the memory.

One of the larger paintings in the exhibition ‘Cliffside Scramble: Searching for the Shrine’ reflects a hillside riddled with pathways. When Jane and her partner first met, they discovered a shrine in the Greek mountains. For years they searched for it again in vain, before eventually finding it. In the painting the shrine is represented by a little triangle, hidden in the landscape. A series of smaller paintings entitled ‘Pond Life’ is also inspired by aquatic plant life. ‘Runway’ suggests the weirdness of a small Greek airport framed by pink mountains while ‘Night Walk’ is about traversing cliff tops in the moonlight.

Her partner was Danish, and some of the paintings are inspired by Scandinavia. Although the two places are very different in terms of landscape, they share a common theme of expansiveness. ‘Crystal Bay’ is an amalgamation of many of the places they used to visit. In all the paintings, there is a sense of standing still and looking out and observing rather than movement.

After an art foundation course in Exeter, Jane studied sculpture at the Camberwell School of Art, but she left before the end of the course to spend a year in Italy. One year turned into five and it was only after she’d had her son and returned to the UK, following a spell in Greece, that she went back to do a painting degree in Brighton in 2000. Jane has recently found more time to dedicate just to painting, for her the beauty of working towards a solo show is “being able to create your own atmosphere”.