Jane Simpson: Painting her world

Adelia Ladson

MOULTRIE — Jane Simpson sees art in her day-to-day surroundings with an artist’s eyes for color.

“God was the most natural artist of them all,” said Simpson, who has built the visual arts program of the Colquitt County Arts Center from the ground up.

She and her family live out in the country in a rustic-style house that seems to complement the land around it. She said she loves to watch the cycle of growth through the crops in the fields that surround her home. She said she has painted the field outside her window thousands of times and it’s different each time.

“I have always been really fond of nature. I guess it has a lot of influence on my artwork,” she said.

Simpson said she studied color theory in college and she is very interested in the relationship of color and space to each other and the relationship of the colors in her paintings.

She likes to paint series of subjects and paint them from different angles. Most of her paintings are a play on color to create movement that creates an atmosphere. She said she believes that colors are therapeutic.

“I paint series and series of the same subject matter. I paint the color relationship over and over again until I’ve learned from it,” she said.

She feels her work, however, is more of the Expressionistic than Impressionism. Her favorite artist is Jan Vermeer, a Dutch painter who, she said, did a lot of things with light and dark in his works.

She said she paints every day and has worked in different media, including water color, and has done different styles of mixed media artwork.

“My real love always goes back to oil painting,” she said.

She has her paints set-up all the time in her house so that she can work whenever she feels like it and her home is full of her artwork.

“I have to do my artwork. I get very uptight if I don’t. An artist is driven to work. You can’t just turn it on and off,” she said.

Simpson was born and raised in Moultrie and her parents owned Cagle’s grocery store so she spent a lot of time in the downtown area. She said she remembers going to the Carnegie Library, which was a block from the grocery store, and sitting in one of the window seats looking at the book’s illustrations and then looking up at the murals that were painted on the ceiling.

“From a very young age I went to the library and the beautiful illustrations were important to me,” she said.

She said she also remembers being allowed to walk around downtown with a friend and going to the movie theater to see movies like “Gone With the Wind.”

“I had a lot of visual stimulation growing up,” she said.

She said that she spent time in Atlanta visiting with her aunt, who loved art. When she was 10, she had her portrait painted in Atlanta and she said she got to see how an artist could bring a painting to life from a model.

“It gives you a great appreciation to see someone bring you to life on canvas,” she said.

She said even in kindergarten when she was done with her reading and had nothing to do in class, she would draw everyone’s profile. She said her teacher did not discourage her but told her she was good.

“Everyone in my family drew. My brother drew architectural plans. He loved to draw them,” she said.

Also, during her childhood, she took painting from Lorraine Atchley, a noted artist in town.

“She encouraged us to paint from life. She pushed that creative thing,” she said.

She said they either painted from still-lifes or came up with their own ideas but never painted from photographs.

Simpson majored in printmaking and has a fine arts degree in painting from Florida State University. She said she worked in advertising on and off throughout college.

“Knowing that being an artist was a risky business, I studied graphic design and went to a technical school and studied accounting,” she said.

She worked for a C.P.A. doing taxes at one time and also for a Realtor designing their books.

“I think technical training is important,” she said matter-of-factly.

After school, she said, she has lived half of her adult life in Atlanta and Tallahassee, Fla., and the other half here in Moultrie. She and her husband moved back to Moultrie in the early ’80s to help with the family’s grocery business. She said there were no art classes in the elementary schools when she moved here.

“There was no foundation for the kids to appreciate art,” she said.

So she and Becky Baird Cowan put together a program “to take on the road” in about 1984 or ’85, she said. Doerun Elementary School was the first to pilot the afternoon arts program. She said after the success of the program at Doerun the other schools wanted to incorporate it too.

“We would pack up in my little red Volkswagen van and go from school to school,” she said laughing.

In 1986, she said, following the renovation to the arts center building, they started having art classes there.

She said the Moultrie Service League worked very hard to raise money for the facility. The league also worked to put art classes into all of the schools and all 50 members went through her two-week class to learn how to teach art classes. Then, they went out and taught six- to eight-week programs in the schools. This eventually resulted in the league hiring a full-time art teacher to service all of the elementary schools in the county.

“Throughout the years we’ve specialized in programming to further the arts education in the schools. Art is something you appreciate when you have a foundation to understand it,” she said.

She said she has learned more from the students themselves and learned how to program for the arts center “from the ground up.”

“The best education comes from actual experience,” she said.

She said that one of her favorite parts of the job was learning to hang exhibitions and curating the collections. She said she loved getting to know the artists who have come through.

Over the years, she has assisted a few artists in getting their works out into the community and has encouraged them.

“We’ve had a whole generation that are just now graduating that have gone out and gotten their degrees (in art),” she said.

However, she said, she encourages them to get their teaching degree as well. She believes in someone having “something to fall back on.”

She said at this time she is focused on getting the community back into the arts center. For the past couple of years she has been on state boards and now that she has rotated off of them, she said, she wants to get back to her community. She said she feel she has lost contact with the human element.

“So, my goal this year is to be more visible ... hands-on,” she said.

Simpson said she has been in almost every arts center in the state and has never seen one quite like the Colquitt County Arts Center. She said it has won several awards and she believes it has influenced many people. She said the people who live in other places have donated art works solely based on the reputation of the center. She said she wishes the community could see the opportunity they have there.

“It’s not that they don’t want to support it. They don’t have any background to appreciate it,” she said.

Simpson said that the general public does not realize it but everyday they are engaged in some kind of art. She said whether it was singing along to the radio and getting dressed in the morning or decorating their home or the farmers plowing their fields into patterns.

“You’re just not conscious that you’re thinking artistically. You can’t escape it. It’s everywhere,” she said.

She said there has been nothing like spending her life working in her field and having her family support her.

“I felt a calling to be here and do this and build this program. ... And I’ve spent my life doing it,” she said.

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