Artist Spotlight With Jane Fisher

"I'm Jane Fisher. I'm an artist in the Cotswolds, and I have fabulous studio in the attic at Griffin Mill, above Pegasus Art, which I co-founded... many years ago."

"For years I concentrated on underwater swimmers, then cyclists and I'll go back to things and now I'm doing big landscapes ... well coastal scenes. I'll do sketches, I'll take photographs. Sketches I find more useful, but photographs set the scene so they are an aid memore. I'll come back and then I'll work out in drawings the shapes and so bring it down, minimalise it and then start drawing it up... in oil, thin oil."

"I'm conscious that in this one you are not meant to cut canvases in half... with the horizon, but I have on this, pretty well. I've given myself a hard task to make this work, but I wanted the big sky and I want the coastal scene to be going right back."

"I do simplify the palette. I'm looking for a tonal range. I don't know how other people work. Which is partly why I do all this sampling, because then I'm putting together the values and be they, sort of, dark or light, sort of tonally. If I can reduce it to just a few colours and mix from those, then the whole painting tends to come together more successfully."

"I love using, sort of the muted colours, earth colours, charcoals. Then I will choose a bright colour to bring everything to life. But ultimately make the decision to keep the colours tonally simplified. Again it goes back to using better quality artist paints, because the colours then I start to mix from those... are more successful. They don't go muddy, they look fresher. And I don’t have to put too many additives into them. You know if you start to using damar varnish based medium... you get a shin on the work. And you'd really only want that at the end of the day, once you had made the decisions about the tonal qualities to start with. "

"I do like bright colours; it's more unusual doing a landscape, so I tend to relate to very bright colours. English landscapes colours are less than that. It's probably why I revert back to my underwater swimmers every now and again. Because they are so bright - I love it."

"Once you fully go into a painting you can just lose yourself. You forget that you're painting, it's just coming naturally. The colours are flowing, the mixing is flowing. Sometimes it's only half an hour of your whole day painting, that is actually working. At other times you can go longer and that's, ultimately I think, why painters are painters."