Jane Harforth - on her painting

There is such beauty in the solitary - whether in island outposts like Orkney or isolated farms in Wiltshire. I have a certain yearning for such places and I translate that feeling into colour on my paper.

When I travel I am drawn to places of wilderness reminiscent of the Northumbrian moors where I grew up and the Argentinian pampas where we had a family farm. Vast expanses also worry me: being alone, cut off and although I harbour dreams of being ‘off grid’ in a shack, I doubt that I will realise them other than in a painting. 

I need beauty and tranquility around me and, rather like the combinations I might choose to make a piece of clothing, I use colour and texture for that sense of coordinated beauty and solitary dwellings for that sense of tranquility.  So my work is primarily about colour and place. 

I don’t like green as a colour in a painting, especially the grassy one! However, I don’t use it primarily because my work does not represent a photograph but rather an emotion. 

As a teenager I was given a print of a Kazimir Malevich, you know the one with a red house on stripes of colour by the sea,  and always wanted to live there.

I also love the work of the post-war St Ives group especially Peter Lanyon, Ivon Hitchens and Patrick Heron and perhaps Ben and Winifred Nicholson.

I like to use household paint to add body to acrylics as it is thick and chalky - there is probably some mixing laziness too. I am also compelled to constantly use pencil and graphite, not for drawing but expression. I usually keep a pencil in my left hand and a brush in my right. Charcoal, oil sticks, chalk and pastels are also my constant companions.