Jane Ostler
Jane Ostler is a Colchester-based painter and printmaker who trained at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham (BA Hons, First Class, in Fine Art) and took an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. After seventeen years as an art facilitator, she returned to her independent practice in 2024, the year of her first major solo show, "Finding the Hand of Kindness", at firstsite in Colchester. Her earlier career included residencies and workshops at the Whitechapel and Serpentine galleries and a printmaker's residency at Peterborough General Hospital, whose print collection holds her work; a 1991 British Council travel bursary for a British–Bulgarian exchange; and the Stowells Trophy (1980), exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 2026 she was shortlisted for the Helen Herbert Portrait Award.
Artist Statement
I combine the found and ready-made with the Abstract and the Imaginative.
I tend to start with drawing, from life or from my own photographs, and then move on to painting and distilling what I want to convey. Paint is also the perfect medium for creating the illusion of depth, using perspective, and vibrant colour to push and pull space; and for creating optical illusions or realistic impressions of human beings, objects, animals and birds. Painting is an object in its own right. By placing a real object, like a large bird's nest, onto a painted space I outsource the painting to something 'other'. It could be said that I would like to 'hand the baby over' to something bigger than me, something with more authority.
Forms emerge, as do themes but they all get pulled together by a fundamental structure.