Jane Burnstein

Jane Burnstein began her informal art training at the hands of her mother and three sisters who have collectively been costume designers, jewellery makers, painters, sculptors and art gallery managers. Her formal art education began at the age of 12 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., and continued during her high school years at the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan. She received a B.F.A. in Painting and Art History at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in 1972. She has taught art in both private institutions and school boards in the United States, Ontario and Quebec. Jane’s drawings and paintings are owned by numerous private collectors across the United States and Canada. Within recent years, she has exhibited in the Ottawa area at the Ottawa City Hall in the Mayor’s Art Festival, Stafford Studios, Cumberland Gallery, and La Petite Mort Gallery. In Toronto, Jane has exhibited at the DeLong Gallery and Brush Gallery (Distillery District).

Fluidity and complexity are fundamental to Jane’s work. Line and form slice through space in carnivalesque choreography, defying containment. Bouncing organic forms, both human and abstract, and brilliant colours reveal metaphors of joy, pleasure and sensuality. But, these same images simultaneously may contain metaphors of pain, fear and loss. The narrative themes, the ambivalence or conflict in imagery, result in an artistic style best described as “magic realism”.

Paintings done in 2006-2007 (Soma Scrolls and the Free Fall Series) continue to explore themes of destabilisation, ambivalence and constant change.