Mary Jane Ansel

Mary Jane Ansell is a British artist, born in Brighton, England. An award-winning oil painter specializing in contemporary, stylized portraits. Her paintings are clear and flawless, exude strong emotionality, are made in soft colors, in a key close to pastel. Mary Jane, graduated from the University of Brighton in 1994 and currently exhibits exclusively at the Fairfax Gallery in London

Her paintings.

People with shells.

Biography of Mary Jane Ansell.

Artist Mary Jane Ansell was born in 1972 in South Shropshire, the most rural of all rural counties in England. These are hills and moorlands, cows and sheep, ducks, wild foxes. For Mary Jane, even now, her native land remains in her memories a great place for the development of children's imagination, a real village idyll. He and his brother disappeared for days on end for all sorts of "adventures" and returned covered in mud and leaves, not knowing such a word as boredom.

Mary Jane bought her first set of paints at the age of 14. Desperate for an easel, she built a tabletop contraption out of wood she found in her father's shed. According to her, she learned by trial and error, drawing knowledge, everything possible, from galleries, books and magazines such as Artists & Illustrators. Mary Jane remembered the feeling of "blurring" of time when she realized how much she liked the process of drawing. Summer holidays in Wales, spent inside a trailer, when, refusing to go outside, she painted all the time.

Mary Jane Ansell received an honours degree in illustration from the University of Brighton in 1994. All this time she worked to pay for her education and, like a nightmare, remembers herself as a waitress in a burger bar, despite the fact that by that time she had been a vegetarian for eight years.

The world of illustration has changed thanks to computer technology. Mary Jane took up portrait and figurative painting in her second year, but also underwent additional training in order to make the most of the achievements of the digital revolution. She worked as a digital illustrator and took on freelance design work, until the commissions for the paintings sold were not enough to be able to paint on a permanent basis.