Jane Lund

Born in Queens, New York, in 1939, Jane Lund attended the Pratt Institute, Queens College and the New York School of Social Research. Lund, who has spent much of her adult life living in Massachusetts, is celebrated for her brilliance in the pastel and watercolor mediums and is also known for her assemblage and collage works on deeply personal themes exploring memories shared with friends and family and her multidisciplinary artistic interests.

Lund’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions around the United States. Her inclusion in "New Talent: New England Show" at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts in 1973 led to a one-person exhibition in Boston in 1977. Jane Lund won the Purchase Prize at the Childe Hassam Fund Exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in 1976 and was awarded first prize for painting at the GWV Smith Art Museum in Massachusetts in 1977.  Jane Lund’s work was selected for inclusion in the exhibition "Perspectives on Contemporary American Realism", shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983. 

Group exhibitions in which Lund’s work has been featured include the 1980 exhibition "Three Woman Show: Contract Point", held at the Springfield Museum of Art [Massachusetts], the inaugural exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum [Massachusetts] titled "Monocular Vision: New England Realist Artists in 1989", the Exactitude exhibition at Forum Gallery in 1996 and "The Figurative Impulse" show, held at the Miami Dade Community College in 1998.

Jane Lund's medium of choice for her “paintings” is pastel. Her richly colored and meticulously detailed pastels, usually consisting of intimate portraits and still lifes, reveal the artist's fascination with form and light. Meditative in tone, Lund provides a contrast between background and object [or sitter], that enables her works to have an immediate and awe-inspiring realism. Lund's pastels are imbued with a dreamlike, hallucinatory clarity not dissimilar to the early self-portraits of William Beckman, to the more phenomenological endeavors of Lund's friend and fellow Massachusetts artist Gregory Gillespie, and even the allegorical themes of the late Ivan Albright.

 

Lund's portraits differ from the directly observed still lifes in that they are derived from photographs and studies. The subjects of these portraits are seen frontally. Their silhouettes fill the space and stare outward. While their totemic countenances are disconcerting, they are not confrontational. These portraits are homages to Lund's relatives and close friends whose lives are entwined with hers. The artist connects with them and imbues their physical features with a remarkable sense of personae and history.

Jane Lund joined Forum Gallery in 1988.  Her work has been acquired by the Jalane and Richard Davidson Collection, Chicago; the De Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA; the De Cordova Museum, the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in Massachusetts; and by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. 

Jane Lund presently resides in Ashfield, Massachusetts.