Jane Irish: Paintings for Winning Hearts and Minds

Jane Irish: Paintings for Winning Hearts and Minds, 2007
Text by Carter Ratcliff
42 pages, Softcover
Published by Locks Art Publications
ISBN: 978-1-879173-51-4

Jane Irish, a self-described "history painter" comments on the politics of war by creating juxtapositions between painterly vignettes and first person reflections. Her lush, Rococo interiors are intensely bright and seemingly sun-filled spaces. These ornate subjects are overlaid with white-lettered text describing the Vietnam veterans' experience creating stark visual contradictions. Carter Ratcliff writing in the catalog essay, "Pleasure and Protest: The Art of Jane Irish," describes "an artist with a tragic outlook, who sees our happiest, most pleasurable impulses intertwined with our most destructive ones."