Biography

Jane Mackay was born in London but spent many of her early years in Cambridge. As a child she was a prolific painter and, intrigued by rudimentary chemistry experiments in the family kitchen, she also immersed herself in the sciences. She attended King's College, London, and Westminster Medical School where she helped to found an annual Arts Festival.

After qualifying as a doctor in 1970 she volunteered for a post in Papua New Guinea, returning to London in 1976 to practise as a GP. She relinquished medicine at the millennium in order to pursue her artistic career full time.

Her career as an artist has evolved along a similarly unconventional path. Though her choice of subjects is wide-ranging, her main passion is painting music. Fascinated by the relationship between the visual and auditory parts of the brain she captures and commits to paper the images she visualises when listening to music. She has found these 'synaesthetic' images a constant source of creative inspiration and, together with her love and knowledge of the classical repertoire, fundamental to her life as an artist. She is both a choral singer and an oboist. Jane is best known for her Britten Series paintings, over two hundred of which are distributed in collections worldwide.

Jane has exhibited extensively in the UK, including solo shows at the Salisbury and Aldeburgh Festivals, at London's Wigmore Hall and at the RNCM Broadwood International Festival in Manchester. She has also exhibited at the Watercolours and Drawings Fair (Royal Academy) and the Art and Antiques Fair (the Spring Olympia). During the academic year 2000-2001 she was Artist in Residence with Cambridge University Musical Society and held two major exhibitions in Cambridge during this residency. There followed solo exhibitions at the Royal School of Church Music, Dorking and St. John's, Smith Square, London. In December 2003 she was invited to take part in the Florence Biennale. More recently Jane has held solo shows at the Ludlow, Aldeburgh and Tewkesbury Festivals.

Her work has attracted considerable media attention and has featured in The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The Guardian and Evening Standard newspapers, and Radio Times, Church Times and BBC Music Magazine. She has been featured on the BBC Online News and her TV appearances have included This Morning with Richard and Judy (Granada) and Come To Your Senses with Adam Hart-Davis (BBC 2) and in 2006 the Child of Our Time series (BBC1) plus an interview during a BBC4 Prom Concert broadcast in the same year. She has taken part in films for the Handel House Museum, Discovery TV, BBC2 Horizon and Icon Films for Channel 4.

Jane designs and organises practical art courses for beginners, and in 2006 masterminded a late-night art workshop at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank as part of the Dan Flavin retrospective.

Jane paints from her studio which is a converted loft overlooking the rooftops and gardens of South London. While she focuses mainly on her music paintings, current commissions include a series of covers for the new Boosey & Hawkes edition Concerts for Choirs. She is currently collaborating with Andrew Plant, Aldeburgh musicologist, on a book of her paintings of Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw, which will be published in June 2007.