Mary Jane Ansell

Mary Jane paints in the old tradition of classical portraiture, but the people she paints feel entirely of now. Her oils are quiet and precise, carried by costume, mood and a sense of the sitter's inner life, so each face seems caught mid-thought rather than posed.

She works in oil, in the careful figurative manner of the portrait tradition she came out of, and brings to it a narrative, cinematic sensibility that gives a single head the feeling of a story.

Ansell has been a finalist four times in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, which went on to commission her portrait of Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou for its permanent collection. Her work is also held at Brighton and Hove Museums and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and she has shown widely with Arcadia Contemporary in New York and Los Angeles.

She lives and works in Wales.

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