Falmouth Maritime Museum: Jane Southern, How Painting Changed my Life

This exhibition finishes on the 19th April 2026

Jane Southern is a local artist who picked up a paintbrush to help her deal with difficult issues in her life.  It provided a distraction from difficult legal issues and grief, as well as recovery from her own illness.  

Jane was already an experienced photographer, so she knew how to frame a composition and capture a specific mood in a landscape.  As untrained painter though, she was very conscious of wanting to learn to do things better and improve her technique.  She began taking a series of workshops, some based at the Newlyn School of Arts and others with specific artists she admires.  

The paintings on show give a very clear progression through the different workshops and experiences.  You can see the impact of each on her paintings, but this does not in my view make the later paintings better than the earliest ones.  There is a softness to her earliest paintings while the most recent are looser in style.  

I always find it hard as a non-artist, someone who has not painted since school, to understand the technique.  Why is one pretty picture better than another?  Why is one artist adored by the critics and museums, while another is ignored.  So for me, its hard to judge a progression in technique.  I liked some of the earlier paintings as much as I liked some of the later paintings.

Although her technique is changing, her vision is less mutable.  Her eye for a landscape, the things she wants to paint, are much more consistent over time.  For the average viewer, it's these things that stand out and make a picture beautiful.  That and the colours used.  I think bad technique can detract from a painting but the difference between good technique and excellent technique is harder to judge.

As much as I enjoyed the paintings themselves, I also enjoyed the way that painting had helped her and that her painting was a journey for her.  I doubt her paintings will be the same in ten years time, but I suspect her vision will remain similar.  Her interests have been shaped over a lifetime.

She visits different places and takes photographs.  If she sees light or clouds, or anything she likes, she captures that moment.  She then paints from the photograph.  Each painting is a memory for her, a precious time capsule.  It's hard to let them go because of this.  I imagine it would be easy to find them new homes.


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