Jane Cruickshank

JANE CRUICKSHANK was born in 1976. She studied Fine Art at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen, completing her Master of Arts degree in 1999.  She has won numerous awards and scholarships including the Cooper and Lybrand Competition in 1996, John Kinross Scholarship to Florence in 1997 and the James Torrance Memorial Award from the Royal Glasgow Institute in 1998.

She has exhibited her paintings widely and has shown very successfully at art fairs in London and Glasgow.  Using recognisable subject matter she employs an intense realism in her paintings, whether still life or portraits. Subjects have a luminescence and clarity that make them appear as if they could move off the canvas.  Jane says, “I started painting the figure while at art college — mainly self-portraits or members of the family, usually on large canvases with the figure placed off centre to create an image of vulnerability. Pattern and surface are tools that I use to explore how the dominance of appearance manipulates the identity.”