Artist Statement
Jane Dees Lovett Holt sees beauty in life and shares her vision in bold paintings that at once reflect and reveal her subjects. She has found inspiration in faces and places from Alaska to Mexico and from her native Arkansas to France and back. Her work has earned display in a variety of venues, from the halls of justice to the walls of private collectors internationally.
Fellow artists have described Jane as a painter with a strong sense of design and composition, employing fresh linear brushwork. She calls her intuitive style soft realism. Jane "shoots from the hip" with zealous, broad strokes and vitality, slowing only to capture an occasional gleam or small detail. Preferring to work from life with a model or en plein air, she captures the interplay of light and color in oil.
Biography
Jane’s artistic bent was evident when she won her first art contest at age eleven. She took her first painting class under the direction of Jack Diner at the Arkansas Arts Center while also studying art at Little Rock Hall High School. She received her B.A. in Art from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, studying under Lothar Kruger and Howard Whitlatch. Jane then taught art at Southwest Junior High in Springdale, Arkansas, Little Rock Parkview High School and the Anthony School, also in Little Rock. After years devoted to raising her sons and doing volunteer work, Jane returned to her love of art with a renewed passion, studying portrait and figurative drawing and painting at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Arkansas Arts Center, and attending numerous workshops. She has studied with Susan Chambers, Kevin Kresse, Marjorie Williams-Smith, Arden Boyce, Barry Thomas, Bruce Peil, Michael Shane Neal and Jeff Legg.
Community Involvement
Jane believes in giving back to organizations that support the artistic community. She designed and donated the logo for the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Society Guild. She provided her popular painting of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center to the THEA Foundation for use in its fund-raising efforts. Thousands of the painting’s postcards and prints have been sold, raising much needed funds for scholarships for young Arkansas artists. She has judged the Young Arkansas Artists competition, the THEA Visual Art Scholarship program, the Racking Horse World Celebration Children’s art shows and the Birch Tree Art Show. Jane has conducted painting demonstrations for the Hot Springs Music Festival and the Pine Bluff Art League. She has taught painting at Life Quest, spoken to the Women’s Leadership Forum, taught plein air workshops and demonstrated plein air painting for the Arkansas Bar Association's annual meeting in Hot Springs. Two of her paintings of Garvan Woodland Gardens were used on the cover of promotional material for the Bar's June 2008 meeting. She has participated in the Garvan Woodland Gardens Invitational Plein Air Paint-Out and Show for several years.
Selected Awards and Honors
In 2006 Jane’s painting Petit Jean II was featured on the invitations to the Inaugural Scholarship Art Exhibition and Sale at the Winthrop Rockefeller Center, where her painting Morning, Petit Jean received the Jurors’ Commendation Award. The same year, she was chosen to participate in the En Plein Air Masters’ Program in France with artist Jeff Legg. Also in 2006, she was invited to participate in the inaugural Art Across Arkansas program sponsored by the Clinton Foundation and the THEA Foundation. Jane provided one of her plein air pieces as well as an explanation of the process for this traveling exhibit that is regarded as a model for other such programs across the country.
In 2008 Jane was juried into the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion Commission’s Calendar, which featured her painting Arkansas Autumn; subsequently, she accompanied Arkansas’ First Lady Ginger Beebe on a book-signing tour. Also that year, Jane joined Plein Air Artists Colorado. The February 2008 issue of American Art Collector magazine quoted Jane about plein air painting and featured one of her works. Her painting Ozark Mountain Morning was selected for the March 2008 cover of The Ozarks Magazine.
Jane was juried into the Nomadas del Arte show in 2008 at Sage Creek Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and again in 2009 at Southwest Gallery in Dallas, where her plein air painting True West won the People’s Choice Award.
A charter member of the Portrait Society of America and an associate member of The Oil Painters of America, Jane’s paintings are in private collections throughout the United States, as well as Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom. Upon its completion, her painting of her husband – retired Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Jack Wilson Holt, Jr. – will hang in the West Wing of the Justice Building in Little Rock.