Jane Reagh has an MFA from Parson’s School of Design in NYC, a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, and a BA from the University of King’s College in Halifax.  She has lived and painted in Canada, the US and Europe, and most recently in Corner Brook, NL.  She has taught painting in the Fine Arts Department at Memorial University, Grenfell Campus, and in the Corner Brook School system.  Her landscape paintings of Western NL (and Southern Ontario, where she spends her summers) explore allowing the paint to speak as paint, at the same time as engaging with the land. 

“I moved to Corner Brook in 2013. The landscape of Western Newfoundland is stunning.  From the moment you drive off the boat in Port-Aux-Basques, the Long Range Mountains rise up and surround you.  Maybe it is still.  Maybe the colours are gold and red.  Or maybe the wind whips in off the ocean and everything is torn into blues and greys.  Sometimes this island feels like an ancient world.  Where there is only light and colour. 

I like to paint outside, feeling the wind, seeing the sun thrown off the snow.  Sometimes I go to the same spot again and again.  I never get tired of it.  The land seems as though it is trying to tell me something and I just have to listen.

This is technology–free painting.  For me to really engage this land I have to be willing to get cold and wet, to be blown around, or get bitten by flies. All my paintings are about being out there.  

The magic of painting is when you see the paint on the board or canvas, and you can see that it is paint, but you can also see that it is water or hills or clouds.  The paint and the land are speaking together.”