Jane Troup
At a recent gallery opening a man asked me, “What are you doing, and how do you do it?” He was a landscape painter and recognized that I wasn’t approaching the subject matter in the same way he was. Well, my answer is this. The landscape is never just the landscape to me. I see the whole world in everything: a leaf curls around the universe, a drop of water envelopes the ocean. So when I paint, everything makes its way in, everything I know and everything I believe and everything I can imagine.
Artist, mother, teacher, romantic, mystic. Jane Troup’s innate curiosity is woven into every painting she creates. With intricate brush strokes and layers of glowing color in oils or gouache, Jane’s work is both visually arresting and hauntingly ethereal, timeless yet modern.
She explores nature through carefully constructed landscapes; “allegoricals” that are bold with symbolism but subtle in composition and “healing” paintings designed to calm and delight the senses.
“Nature’s lesson to me, although I am still quite confused at times, is that nothing but love exists,” Jane explains. “The world is safe and has order. Beauty is the manifestation of love.” Not only are Jane’s paintings infused with the radiance of nature but through pairing familiar objects with surreal forms, the viewer is challenged to see the world through her eyes, to reinterpret the everyday, to embrace the spiritual, and to revel in her glorious hues.
English art critic and poet John Ruskin once said, “The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.” If this is true, the mind of painter Jane Troup must be infinitely pure and brilliantly thoughtful for her colors capture and enchant.
Jane paints in the studio of her 1915 Craftsman-style home in Springfield, Missouri or at The Knoll, her retreat in the country. Gathering inspiration from her family and her surroundings, be it the hills of Tuscany or the Ozarks, the seaside of Cape Cod or Florida, Jane Troup’s paintings are so much more than meets the eye.