Literature

Jane Heath’s post-graduate training at the Royal College of Art in London placed her within the orbit of Stanley Spencer, Edward Bawden and John and Paul Nash, some of Britain’s greatest modernist painters. While her style remained ever-rooted in this British, vanguard tradition, the work she later produced in South Africa, where she moved with her artist-husband Jack Heath in 1946, was based on careful observation and meticulous design, concerned more with decorative, ‘pictorial poetry’ than theory for theory’s sake.

An important teacher at the Pietermaritzburg Technical College, and Fine Art lecturer at the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of Natal from the early 1950s, Jane Heath produced a large body of work in a wide range of media and, while never seeking the spotlight, exhibited successfully around the country. Her plein-air watercolour studies, of which Foothills is a fine example, reveal an outrageous comfort in the medium, and a seemingly effortless if decisive use of line. The way her peak-level clouds swirl and catch the sunlight, and the way her valleys fall away in shadow, give a thrilling, wet-nose sense of a vaporous, stifling Drakensberg day.