JANE JOSEPH

1961- 1965 BA Hons Fine Art, Camberwell College of Art, London
1991 & 1995 Abbey Award, British School at Rome

Collections include: Arts Council of Wales; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; British Museum; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Imperial College, London; Lindley Library (RHS), London; Yale Center for British Art, USA, Herbarium Library, Royal Botanic Garden, Kew

Jane Joseph is a realist of the no-nonsense variety. She is drawn to real places, she is obsessed by actual phenomena, perceived facts, felt sensations. But she fastidiously avoids the pitfall that has caught so many realists past and present of sentimentalising grime. This is not to say that her art is prosaic; it has its own kind of heroism, one which has to do with fixing within the finished product a sense of the restless effort that went into its making… Joseph's art is a no-go area for any tropes of effort: no random open biting here, no tears or lesions in the page, no studied grubbiness …

… There is nothing effete about Jane Joseph's touch. Even when she etches flowers, catching their intricacy with an incredible subtlety of line and tone, nothing of her robust, awkward, exploratory hand is suppressed. She equally holds back from theatricality … Even when they are deeply bitten or heavily drawn, even where they are agitated and abrasive, her marks seem interrogative rather than declamatory, astute rather than strident. This, surely, is what keeps her line so strangely alive, what compels sometimes awkward or inscrutable passages to reward the patient gaze.

David Cohen, Drawn in Place Exhibition Catalogue, Morley Gallery 1997

Kinderszenan: Of Strange Lands and Peoples 2006