Jane Norling

Artist Statement:

The natural world is the heart of my artmaking, changed into landscape as it is by the mind’s interpretation, civilization standing just outside the painted picture plane. 

I am captivated by vast outdoor spaces shaped by water, wind, and geologic movement. As I walk, exhilarating visual compositions are gathered as photo references, to reappear in my studio where I paint and draw to express a sense of the natural world that sustains us.

I develop my paintings in layers of transparent oil color interspersed with vigorous graphite marks on canvas, panel or heavy paper. Beginning as drawings they retain elements of specific location while conveying a broader sense of geography. Jazz and abstract expressionist painting inspire improvisation based on solid structure.

Occasionally the built world asserts itself on my imagination, and my photos of a melted house high on a Pacific bluff combine with images of my landscape paintings to form a new construct in our digital era–a printed work that is neither photo nor painting, but originating from both. My digital artwork–made of pixels–manifests as prints on paper or prints on aluminum–creating object-like shapes whose origins are familiar but not quite understood.

In painting and printmaking, my interest is to bring together the sensual experience of the natural world with how we imagine landscape–its home in our mind.

Jane Norling is a California painter and digital printmaker with a focus on landscape. 

Active in Bay Area CA cultural venues since 1970 as painter, designer/illustrator and public artist, Jane merged the sensibilities of fine art with aesthetics of design to create strong imagery advocating a point of view. Changing direction in 2000, she worked her love of the natural world into painting, exploring the sensual experience of landscape while pursuing her interest in the mutable boundaries of water and land. Both of specific place and universal, Jane’s paintings touch viewers with a sense of being there.

Her digital artworks exploring landscape’s interior mind combine her photos of an environmentally-stressed building with images of her landscape paintings to form a new construct in our digital era–a printed work that is neither photo nor painting, but originating from both. 

Jane graduated from Bennington College with a BA in painting and printmaking, studying with Pat Adams, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, among others in a fervent era in US art. She was awarded a residency at the Morris Graves Foundation in 2009. Her series "Shaped by Water" launched in solo exhibition in 2007; "Cappadocia Ex/Interiors" exhibited in Oakland in 2008. Her work is collected in the Oakland Museum of California and University of New Mexico, with purchase awards from Alameda County (CA) Art Collection. She works at her painting studio in Oakland and design studio in Berkeley.