I was born in Derby, officially the most haunted city in England. I grew up in Derbyshire and immigrated to Canada in 1978 at age 22. I live in Mission, beautiful British Columbia, the home base from which I take photographs, research, write and paint.
I began to paint seriously in 1992, using mixed water media. I experimented diversely with acrylics, watercolor, inks and pastels, but when I discovered colored pencils I knew that I’d found something that excited me. I saw an awesome creative potential, and I found the work of other colored pencil artists fascinating and compelling.
Since then I’ve used them in almost every painting I’ve completed over the years. I love the control they give me when rendering detail, as well as the saturation of color that I am able to achieve.
I’m a mythic artist. My paintings reflect the spiritual myths and mysteries of this planet, and I usually select the point where our world intersects with other dimensions as a starting place for each piece.
Despite my passion for painting, circumstances were going to steer me firmly and mysteriously in another different yet connected direction.
I couldn’t have known at the time that some of my other life-long areas of interest, study and research, as well as my painting and writing, were preparing me for an entirely different kind of work that I could never have foreseen.
Since an early age I’ve been passionately interested in the paranormal and other connected subjects, quite literally as far back as I can remember. Although this may not seem pertinent to an artist bio, as you will see in this particular instance it certainly is.
As well as being an artist, writer, researcher and photographer, I’m a psychic photo-medium. I photograph spirits and other paranormal phenomena, profusely.
My experiments and research in this direction led me to develop a photo-editing technique that has taken me on a fascinating journey into largely unexplored worlds where I have been able to discover some amazing but hidden secrets about the true nature of the photographic image.
As a result of this research I have become very interested in photographic imagery in general, but with perhaps a slightly different perspective than most people.
I soon noticed that some of the photographs of landscapes that originated from my experimentation were beautiful in their own right. I became fascinated by the shapes, colors and forms I found across the photographs, and by the nature of light itself.
Some of the photos contained unusual impressionist or abstract landscapes, only with a slight twist, as they frequently also contained images of spirits of many different kinds. While editing them I noted that while some looked like oil or acrylic paintings, others appeared more like pastels or crayon/pencil work.
Once edited for exposure and color they appeared as works of art, containing elements of the spiritual components of the landscape and its hidden denizens.
While editing a paranormal photograph to reveal more clearly the entity captured in the image means I have to concentrate on bringing out the details of the anomaly more clearly at the expense of the rest of the photograph, but preparing a photo as an art piece is a different matter.
The pieces offered here in this gallery have been optimized as art, and therefore the details that the ghostly faces and figures can be shown to have when subjected to the correct editing technique have been lost.
Although my work can probably be technically labeled as ‘outsider art’ because of its unusual content! I would like to believe that it might help open the door to the acceptance of a new form of art, one that is brought into existence by a collaborative effort between the artist and beings who exist primarily in a different dimension than our own.
My current work and plans for the future are varied, and some of them are listed below:
• I’m working on a painting and will probably always be in the middle of one.
• I will be continuing my photography and research in relation to paranormal imagery and editing into the foreseeable future, and hope at some point to work in collaboration with other interested researchers, psychics and *ITC experimenters.
• I recently produced **‘Just the Other Side of Here’, a CD presentation of amazing interdimensional photo-galleries and articles relating my discoveries, as well as tips for those who wish to experiment for themselves.
• I’m presently producing a special presentation of my findings after researching in another area linked to imagery but not related to art.
• My next project is one that I’m looking forward to. I’m producing a presentation of genuine faery and nature spirit photography with accompanying text, and I believe I will be the first person to ever do this. I have dozens of enchanting photographs. Unfortunately I have to keep them secret until they are published in book and CD format because they are phenomenal. A section will include art created from the unique photographs, which I consider to be gifts to pass on to the world on behalf of those who participated from another dimension.
Please visit my website and see my blog posts for more information on photographing spirits, elemental life and many other diverse and largely unknown life-forms, and to discover further how they relate to a brand new kind of art.
I hope you will come back and see my progress from time to time, because when my new material is released and made public, my discoveries may change your vision of life as you believed it to be!
*ITC: Instrumental Transcommunication. An exchange of information between disembodied spirits and the living by means of an instrument, usually electronic in nature. The messages or pictures are both received and stored using some kind of technical device. When I intend to photograph spirits and they agree to communicate with me by manifesting on the photographs, this is a type of Instrumental Transcommunication. There are many instruments that can be used for this type of experimentation, including but not limited to TV, radios, tape recorders, computers, and telephones.
**If you wish to see spirits in stunning detail, I have galleries and articles that can be downloaded and I will be making some of them available free to those who are interested in knowing more about this extremely compelling subject.
Jane Tripp joined Fine Art America on June 24th, 2010.
