Jan Nelson facts for kids
Jan Nelson (born 1955) is an Australian artist. She creates amazing art using sculpture, photography, and painting. She is most famous for her super realistic pictures of teenagers. Her artworks have been shown in many places in Australia, and also in Paris and Brazil.
Her art can be found in important Australian galleries. These include the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Her work is also at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane. She even represented Australia at a big art show in São Paulo, Brazil.
Early Life and Learning
Jan Nelson was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1955. She went to the Victorian College of the Arts and finished her studies there in 1983.
Later, in 2018, she earned a special degree called a PhD from Deakin University. Her research looked at how painting can still be important in our modern world, which is full of digital screens and computers.
Her Art Career
When Jan Nelson first started painting, she explored landscapes. In the 1980s, she focused on ideas about politics and how people use spaces. She made drawings using crayons.
After the mid-1980s, Nelson began to think about women's roles in society. She explored how women sometimes felt invisible. Her artworks from this time included traditional crafts like plaster work and basket weaving.
From 1989 to 1991, Nelson created a group of artworks called The Long Century.
In her work International Behaviour (2000), she used a photo of people escaping Vietnam in boats. She placed this photo over bright colors and patterns. In 1994, Nelson showed sculptures that reminded people of the Grand Canyon and the Amazon jungle. These were simple shapes placed on stands. Even then, art experts noticed her dramatic style. They also commented on how she presented her works on plinths, which are special stands for sculptures.
Nelson's more recent art is super realistic. It looks as shiny and perfect as pictures you might see in advertisements or magazines. Her works often show young people. They seem to be caught between their own world and what they wish for.
Nelson's most famous series of works is called Walking in Tall Grass. These are portraits of teenagers. Nelson worked on this series for fifteen years, finishing in 2016. She started by taking photos of people she knew and also strangers. She used these photos to create her paintings. Sometimes, she would combine a head from one person with a body from another.
When she paints these portraits, Nelson adds very bright colors. She often paints reflections in the eyes or sunglasses of the people. To make the colors even more exciting, Nelson sometimes painted the walls of the art gallery in bright colors too. Each young person in her paintings is dressed in a unique way. Their clothes and accessories show their own style and the fashion of the time.
However, each person in the paintings looks away from the viewer. This suggests they are thinking deeply or are unsure about their future. In an interview, Nelson explained the title. She said that when you walk in tall grass, you can't go back. You have to keep moving forward, even if you can't see where you are going.
About Her Works
Jan Nelson's art is full of strong feelings, interesting textures, and intense colors. Her works often show a mix of fear and power, or calmness and disagreement. Her art is also influenced by her own teenage years in the 1970s. That was a time of big social, political, and cultural changes.
Nelson uses many different art forms. These include painting, sculpture, photography, and installations (art that fills a space). She focuses on how what we see helps us understand ourselves as we grow up. Her art is both attractive and a little unsettling. Its energy comes from her interest in things that are changing.
Nelson's stories in her art often involve important moments. They show transformations and the spaces in between. These are times when big changes can happen. For example, in the 1990s, her paintings explored famous modern art ideas. She re-imagined works by artists like Yves Klein. This led to an exhibition called Incident 1960. It looked at how art copies reality and the connections between painting, photography, and 3D objects.
In the early 2000s, Nelson started her super realistic and brightly colored painting series, Walking in Tall Grass. A curator named Rachel Kent explained that Nelson's paintings are very clear. She paints her subjects carefully from photos she takes herself. The works show a young person, male or female, who is just becoming a teenager. They are very individual, with special features, clothes, or accessories.
These young people don't look directly at the viewer. This "disconnect" or refusal to engage might show what being a teenager is like. It can be a time of thinking alone and avoiding adults. Each portrait is unique. The person is shown against a simple, colored background. Sometimes, Nelson combines parts of different people in her digital process. She might use the head of one person and the arms of another. This makes the painting go beyond a simple photo. It creates a super-real feeling and very strong colors and emotions. Nelson says the painting "begins to vibrate." She often shows these works on gallery walls that she paints with stripes. This adds more color and contrast to the figures in the paintings.
In 2013, her exhibition Strange Days connected ideas from the 1970s with current protests. For example, one artwork was called Defiance. It was a life-size copy of a water barrier. These barriers were used by police during the Occupy Melbourne protest. One barrier was left alone inside the protest camp. This single barrier, useless by itself, became a strong symbol. It showed that power comes when individuals join together. A graffiti tag was added to it later, making it an even stronger symbol of standing up for what you believe in.
For Nelson, the work done by human hands is very important. She believes it shows the difference between trying to be perfect and the reality of our unique, sometimes flawed, human nature. She says that in all her work, the meaning is in the process. It's where handmade art meets very precise industrial methods. Whether it's a super-real copy of a photo or a screen, or a simple striped wall, everything follows exact instructions. This is done to create a kind of perfection. More importantly, it makes us think about what art truly represents. By being so exact, Nelson aims to show the stress and challenges of modern life.
Awards and Recognition
- 1983–1984 Australian Council for the Arts grant for a residency in France
- 1984–1985 Australian Council for the Arts Project Grant
- 1986 Artist in Residence at Victorian College of the Arts
- 2003–2004 Australia Council grant
- 2004 John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize at National Gallery of Victoria
- 2009 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery, for Walking in Tall Grass (Tom)
Collections
- Art Gallery of New South Wales
- Bendigo Art Gallery
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
- National Gallery of Victoria
- National Gallery of Australia
- Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art
- Art Gallery Western Australia
- Monash University Museum of Art
- Ian Potter Museum of Art
- Heide Museum of Modern Art
