Jane Brayne is an artist with an international reputation as a painter and illustrator of ancient landscapes, people and objects. She was series artist on BBC 2’s Meet the Ancestors, her work is widely published and represented in museums, including the British Museum. Her career in archaeology began on a dig at Stonehenge and her comic strip book for children is a best seller there.

Her collaborations with archaeologists continue alongside her own practice as a painter. Recent work includes an illustration of Dartmoor near Wistman’s Wood, commissioned by the National Parks Authority. The pandemic has led to an increased number of visitors and pressure on the delicate ecosystems and archaeology of the moor. The hope is that damage might be mitigated by placing an information lectern in this strategic spot.

Jane’s paintings begin with everyday connections to her surroundings, drawing the shapes, colours and rhythms of land, trees, people and still life. The work of Samuel Palmer and the tradition of the Romantic Modernists, who owed him so much, is an enduring element.

Her work holds a sense of place and continuity through time whilst acknowledging the contemporary fragility of these things. She uses a range of mediums but loves and often returns to the traditional mix of watercolour, gouache, crayons and inks deeply rooted in English landscape painting.