Jane Courquin

Pink Still Life with Grapes, Blossom and Quince, French Still Life Painting

2022

Jane Courquin is a contemporary painter with work available in our gallery at Wychwood art and online. Courquin is registered with La Maison des Artistes, Paris and has been living and working in France as an Artiste-Peintre since 2003. She has British and French Nationality. After studying on a Foundation Diploma in Art at Cheltenham Art College she undertook a BA Double Honours Degree in French and German with a strong emphasis on Art History that took her to Berlin for her year abroad and Der Freie Universitat Berlin where she specialised in German Expressionism and Early Modernism in the field of Art. Exhibiting paintings and painting large scale murals in Brighton in her early twenties she followed this with a PGCE in Art and Drama received from Westminster College, The University of Oxford. Courquin has travelled extensively in Japan, India, Nepal and North Africa before choosing to settle in France where she feels most at home. In France she has run workshops with her husband the artist Nicholas Hamper who trained at the Slade and the Royal College and together they have renovated old french farm buildings into amazing studios and a home. She exhibits in France and the Uk and has undertaken commissions for several urban projects which include three mural fresques for EDF. For Courquin every day is a full painting day. Frequenting the brocantes and vide greniers to unearth old french pots and pans and french vintage textiles for her studio still lives is an essential part of her painting practice. The studio is full of antique cafetières and midcentury enamelware as well as shelves filled with literature and art books. Courquin takes much of her inspiration from modernist subject matter in literature, art and aesthetics so the canvas becomes interwoven with a composition that moves the eye easily around the surface until it is lost in a poetic narrative that unravels through each layer leaving a sense of a profound and harmonious experience . Colour comes first and is an important expressive emotional element in her work. The modernist and postmodern European literature and aesthetics she studied at the University of Sussex often find their way into her painting as ideas and lines of thought that become translated in to the visceral and visual language of paint. A flattened and shallow perspective and a disrespect for a linear timeline create a multi layering of line and pattern in her compositions that are held together by an intrinsic core of joie de vivre and passion for expressing it. Her work has a sense of that very french element of ‘ je ne sais quoi ‘ . Courquin has always felt herself to be a painter and moved in artistic circles in all the places she has lived and worked , intuitively seeking out the creative and likeminded minority for company. She has met and befriended many other inspirational artists along the way and continues to develop a strongly individual creative and iconic language.