ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m so pleased to have this artwork accepted into In Full View! at WMG as it has never been exhibited and is a complete experiment with nothing produced before or after that is similar.
I was trained as a figurative artist and work mostly with oils. In 2024, after my mother’s unexpected passing, I found myself halfway through a planned sabbatical leave. The University where I taught had accepted my carefully considered plans but I was in my studio, week after week, with absolutely no desire to follow any of it.
Eventually, I began clearing the studio of the stuff that I never used and at one point saw a small box of plaster and decided to explore making some before tossing. I remember taking a small painting rag, dipping it into the mix and wiping it over a board. I thought of mopping, and women’s work, and how women throughout the ages have cleaned up other’s messes. I loved how sculptural the rag became and pressed some torn pages of an art magazine onto the surface just before it dried. It was much later that I noticed, and began to appreciate, the interesting contrast of showing woman’s work with an image of Narcissus peering at his reflection.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Professor Emerita Jane Barrow lives and works in a historic residential neighborhood near downtown St. Louis. Initially trained as a figurative painter, her interests cross between observation and invention, with much of her work centering on stillness in relation to motion.
Barrow received her MFA in painting from Indiana University in Bloomington and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. She has shown nationally and internationally with work in the collections of John Mellencamp; the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, VA; Lungwha University, Taipei, Taiwan; PNC Financial Services Group, Pittsburgh, PA; and Ameren and CIBC, Chicago; to name a few. Ms. Barrow has been a repeat resident at the Vermont Studio Center and Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Providence, Rhode Island. She recently retired from her position as Professor and Head of Painting at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where she taught for twenty-five years.
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© Jane Barrow
