Jane Sand exhibition

 Jane Sand had an exhibition at Redwing gallery in July.

This is an unusual place, run as a not for profit community enterprise. There is a cafe with vegan food and often musical events with visiting musicians or the in house band which has a  South American Cuban style in keeping with the leftwing green politics of which one can find news by dropping in.

Jane Sand is a well known colourful character with strong views who gives painting workshops at Redwing and recently gave a lively talk on the writing of Edna O’Brien.
She has been known to go out at night to paint in the wilds of West Penwith where she lives, working quickly and returning with paint marked clothes.

The show was described to me by one visitor as the best he had ever seen at Redwing and it made an enormous visual impact of wild expressionist colour and brushwork with thick paint using every inch of the surface.

Strangely the artist seemed to have flung the pictures up in an unusually crowded manner as if using any available nail left by others with none of the considered spacing one is accustomed to.

A couple of the works had figures, one a naked woman rather alarmingly cavorting in a grave yard.
I preferred the landscapes -  a gnarled tree, a mine depicted on the anniversary of a terrible disastrous accident there, a church seen at night enlivened with colour and the vigour of its application.
The famous ‘men-an-tol’ Bronze Age holed stone relic on the moors was made extra dramatic by the compositional diagonal and a moonlit sky.

Jane Sand had kept the prices mostly under £300, wanting them to be affordable.

Her work deserves to be more widely known and is clearly the work of a passionate artist with a wonderfully authentic expression of excitement and liveliness.