Portrait of Jan Brown

Romola Templeman was born in Perth in 1935 and studied art at the highly regarded Slade School of Fine Art in London in the early 1950s. She had her first solo exhibition at Skinner Gallery in Perth in 1959, and her work has subsequently been included in over thirty exhibitions in Western Australia, Tasmania, Albury, Sydney and Canberra.

Romola Templeman’s Portrait of Jan Brown is a warm and charming painting, a portrait of the artist in her studio, where her materials and tools and sculptures are a substantial part of the work’s subject – appropriately, as Jan Brown’s art-making is intrinsic to her sense of self. Brown is a very significant figure in Canberra’s art history and versions of some of the bird sculptures depicted in Templeman’s portrait of Brown are in the CMAG collection. The detail in this portrait is incredibly engaging, of more than passing interest to artists and art historians, and includes items such as a wooden box Brown used when she was studying sculpture under Henry Moore at Chelsea Polytechnic School of Art (London) in the late 1940s.

Romola Templeman has been a friend of Jan Brown since her arrival in Canberra from Perth, and they have worked together as artists and teachers; both women have a shared passion for drawing, and had similar experiences of studying and living in London in the decade after WWII. It is also noteworthy that Romola Templeman is married to the poet and editor Ian Templeman, with whom Jan Brown collaborated on two artist books: A Particular Raven, 2000 and Icarus 2003, with Brown’s etchings illustrating Templeman’s poems. This painting is clearly an affectionate record of a person and a friendship, and has a degree of intimacy not found in official portraits.