Jane Millican
'Untitled (green)'

Oil on canvas
175 x 175 cm

Jane Millican was born in Dumfries in 1966. She studied at the University of Northumbria Newcastle upon Tyne 1996-99 and was Graduate Fellow in Painting there 1999-2000. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art 2002. She has exhibited in a number of group shows in Newcastle and London 1999-2002.

"I enjoy the theatricality of Action Painting. I enjoy big bombastic paintings and images and ideas that lend themselves to theatricality and camp. Camp is just doing something self-consciously: a familiar idea becoming slightly exaggerated and absurd. Camp is not a negation; it's not ironic; you get all the fun of participating in something but with more freedom and more possibilities.

I try to make work according to a system, so that I don't need to set up any particular relationship with interpretation or the outside world. I choose attention-seeking colours, from cartoons or children's toys, because I don't want the paintings to go unnoticed. I pour the colours onto the canvas. If paint spills onto the floor, I scrape it up and put it back.

Once the canvas is covered I always want to carry on painting. I want the painting to be more dramatic, more absurd, more blatantly entertaining. Some passages of paint are always more entertaining than others. They have more character, they promise to become something else. I work into these, augmenting their character. The finished painting is partly a record of the events that made it, and partly a hammed up, dramatic reconstruction of real events."