Jo March

Jo was born in 1962 and brought up in her parents’ cottage and on a family farm in the small moorland village of Darite in South East Cornwall. In 1985, she graduated with first class honours in History from the University of Sheffield and returned to the pull of countryside, beginning her career as a self taught professional artist.

Jo’s West Country upbringing has been a strong influence on her choice of subject and the depiction of landscape. Inspiration for her paintings is often drawn from the environment and the people of her childhood. She has an abiding fascination with the eccentricities which exist just below the surface of rural life and in particular the characters whom she observed around her whilst growing up.

Says Jo: “I find that my work is always about home. About bricks and mortar of course; there are endless little homes in the paintings; but more than that, about home as a known landscape. All my landscapes are imaginary but I feel by the time I’ve painted them, I know them very well and I know the people who live there. Often “home” is about a return to an imagined ideal – a subject close to my heart – endlessly explorable in all forms of art, and people often don’t even know it’s what stirs them in something they have seen or heard. I hope the paintings have a sense of stillness, moments in time. I think I’m looking for the profundity of true simplicity, if that makes any sense at all. I guess I’m nostalgic and I admit I idealise rural living, but I also feel people formerly had a capacity to accept simplicity which we can no longer imagine.

I’m also looking at coexistence and kindness between the humans in their ‘human condition’, animals and the natural world. And most solidly of all, with all these tiny specks living on it, is the land in its big green coat. All the paintings come from words as much as visual inspiration for me. In fact the idea or story is the thing.”

Jo’s work is imaginative, idiosyncratic and original; often suffused with a joy and lightness, at other times with a darker sense of the macabre, with a magical realist’s eccentricity that has attracted a strong following both at home and abroad.