The roads leading to the vocation of artist are mysterious and tangled. Jane Stewart built a stellar career as a researcher and professor of psychology at Concordia University (Royal Society Fellow, Order of Canada), and form many years, was an avid collector of contemporary art. In 2001, she started painting in her spare time.  Since leaving Concordia as professor emeritus, she has pursued her new-found passion with rigour. Her studio on avenue du Musée looks like any other serious artist’s environment: a pleasing clutter of tools, paints, works-in-progress and others possibly finished – or not.

I’d seen several good pieces at Jane’s home, but the full force of her painting only really hit me at the exhibition she held recently to celebrate her birthday and retirement. Many works flew off the walls; fortunately some of my favourites hung on, which is how they came to be part of this event. As with many painters at the beginning of their journey, Jane explores several styles, approaches, themes. While the works shown here can’t be called representative, they are, I believe, compatible and of a piece.

Few women painters attempt the nude. Torso and her companion, Women Emerging, are warm and sensuous, but at the same time, unwilling to forgo complexity, psychology – normally the first details to disappear when men catch women naked. What are we to make of an armless body, sutured from collarbone to pelvis? Or is this just a trick of shadows? These painting manage to be beautiful without dwelling on an obviously beautiful woman, which to me means they have escaped the all too obvious trap presented by the nude; they are not pictures of other pictures, they are states of being, seeing, mysterious, and better for it.

The animals are also nudes, of a sort. Is there something of the science mind looking at these forms, dissecting bodies?  Such gorgeous textures and depth of colour.

- Marianne Ackerman

www.janestewartpainting.com

Woman Emerging	Bird Transformed	Bird