Contemporary artist Jo Rance discusses the vibrant, playful and pastel-rich palette she uses to depict the English countryside, and how her background in textiles lends texture to her tapestry-like paintings. Jo also provides insights into her processes, like how painting outside observationally connects her to the landscapes she loves, as well as her jig-saw like approach to composition.
Artist Insights: Jo Rance
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Contents
0:00 “Anyone can paint.”
0:11 “The dialogue between land and sky”
0:36 “All I ever intend to do is to provoke joy”
0:57 Introduction
1:19 “I was always the kid who wanted to draw at the table”
1:55 “Who doesn’t want to learn how to weave?”
2:11 “I keep coming back to the word, intuitive”
2:53 “We would spend days in the dye lab, picking out our colour palettes, then hours threading these looms up”
4:06 “I have this immediacy, the more you practice with the paint that you use, the more you can use it in ways that make the paintings look like your paintings”
5:33 “I will go in with accents, pastel pinks, lilacs, I love a bright red”
6:44 “Sometimes I feel like I have rose-tinted glasses on when I am seeing stuff, which immediately gives you this more vibrant colour palette and playfulness”
7:40 “I tried to create this whimsical sense of where the mountain meets the sky, making these sort of personified mountain and sky”
8:32 “I would happily paint the river by my house a thousand times, it’s always going to be different”
9:43 “You are never going to get home from a walk in the outdoors and feel worse for it”
10:16 “The visual change in Spring is the most dramatic, and in turn the most inspirational for me as a painter”
10:58 “The core point of my painting practice, and my life as an artist, is these small moments of joy that make the world go around”
12:18 “I only really want to paint what I have actually seen, and what I’ve sat in, walked in”
13:19 “I deconstruct the landscape in my mind, before I start the painting, so I know what needs to come first”
15:19 “Going outside painting is like a muscle I am trying to flex”
18:11 “My sketchbook becomes a bank of visual knowledge that informs future work”
19:46 “I have been painting full-time since”
21:26 “Sometimes I will use a tiny bit of acrylic flow medium…it can make the whole experience a lot more glidey and frequent”
22:40 “All those tiny decisions in taking that one photo, I feel like create that authenticity in the painting because I have stopped in that moment”
24:10 “Feeling like you can be drawn in, I love that feeling… you can almost step into what I have painted”
26:16 “I stick to quite a traditional working day”
27:45 “To have any space to paint is an ultimate privilege in my mind”
29:12 “I am guilty of having a lot of reality TV on when I am painting”
29:50 “Natural bristle brushes are a huge part of my secondary painting process after I have laid out the flatter shapes of colour”
32:01 “A lot of the time, a good painting has had a very ugly stage, and that is really normal”
33:36 “It’s that just before moment, when you think, okay, no, we’re done, I can leave this”
34:51 “I don’t think you can argue with David Hockney’s spirit and joy for landscape”
36:40 “If you are doing something that makes you happy and brings you joy, keep doing it”
37:43 Credits
Extract
Anyone can paint. I’ve just stuck at it. This elitist idea of “Oh, I couldn’t do that because I haven’t been trained” – it’s not true. You can. I did.
I Like Walking With You, 2023
Jo Rance
Acrylic and acryla gouache on panel, 40 x 50 cm | 15.7 x 19.6 in
Dialogue between land and sky, the earth and us as people, the flowers that grow from the ground to the trees that you walk through. I do think that they have their own personalities. And it’s fun to think about that when I’m painting. My only intention is to provoke joy. All of the English landscape, I want to encapsulate that in my paintings and share with the viewer the joy that everyone should feel when they’re outdoors.
The First Hawthorn Bloom, 2024
Jo Rance
Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60 cm | 19.6 x 23.6 in
My name is Jo Rance, I’m a contemporary landscape painter, and I’m here in the Jackson’s Studio to talk a little bit about my practice. I’m largely a self-taught painter. My first memories of making art are probably as a small child. I was always the kid who wanted to draw at the table with paper and pencils, or if we were out for tea, I’d have a napkin and a biro. I’ve always loved drawing.
Young Jo, with a snail
I didn’t think I could pursue art as a career, but I went along with my friend who was visiting universities at the time – she was looking at textiles courses. So when we went to Loughborough University, I saw how amazing their textiles course was, the facilities, and the fact that they did weaving. I thought, who doesn’t want to learn how to weave? So the rest is history.
Jo working at the loom
My experience at Loughborough University was honestly 10 out of 10. I chose to focus on weaving – I wanted to learn something that I couldn’t learn anywhere else. It was very hands-on. We just spent days sort of in the dye lab picking out our colour palettes, then literally hours threading these looms up. So I think my background in textile design is definitely still apparent in my painting. Sometimes people will look at my work and compare it to embroideries or tapestries, which, when they don’t know about my previous work in textiles, can be quite interesting. It is obviously intuitive the way that I apply paint or make marks that replicate the look of textiles and tapestries.
Jo’s studio at Loughborough University
Handwoven organza with handpressed and stitched flowers
I mainly use acrylic paints, including acrylic gouache. As long as it dries quickly, I like it – I need the immediacy.
My relationship with colour comes from the shades I’m naturally drawn to. A lot of my work features a range of pastel tones – muddier pastels mixed with fresher ones, cut with more acidic colours like chartreuse or a sharp turquoise. I think when you’re working with those kinds of middle-ground tones, they need something to lift them. So I’ll add accents such as pinks and lilacs. And I love bright reds. Fluorescent Pink is great for accents. And for an underpainting colour, a little bit of Fluorescent Pink mixed in with Windsor & Newton Potter’s Pink. That’s kind of my secret recipe for a great muted, but still bright pink. I also love chartreuse and kind of an olive green, as well as dark forest greens, and sap green. Basically pinks and greens!
Thinking of You, 2025
Jo Rance
Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 90 cm | 27.5 x 35.4 in
I love mixing colours, and I think colour palettes can feel really personal. Everyone mixes differently and has their favourite shades. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses, which brings out a more vibrant, playful palette. The joy of painting a landscape is that you can decide whether you want the river to be lilac or whether you want the sky to be a very specific shade of muted pink.
Amongst the Heather, 2025
Jo Rance
Acrylic & Acryla Gouache on panel, 60 x 60 cm | 23.6 x 23.6 in
In my final year of uni, we had our degree show. and my collection was called Where the Mountain Meets the Sky, where I first discovered my interest in the British countryside and the landscape. I tried to create this sort of whimsical sense of where the mountain meets the sky, playing on this idea of the British landscape, but also British etiquette. I found that really fed into my work, especially through my colour palettes and the pastel tones I was using.
Loughbourgh Degree Show, 2019
If I’m travelling around the country or abroad, I’ll definitely pick up inspiration. But I’d happily paint the river by my house a thousand times. It’s always different. The seasons change, the light shifts, and you’re always going to see something new, a different perspective. There’s so much on our doorstep that we don’t even notice.
The Morning After the Last Frost, 2025
Jo Rance
Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 120 cm | 39.3 x 47.2 in
When I left Loughborough University, I really thought I was going to make a career in textiles and was actually set to move up North and be a textiles technologist. Looking back, I think I would have been really unhappy doing that because I think it would have been too constrained. At the start of 2020, everything came to a halt. Plans didn’t come to fruition, and over the next six to nine months, I didn’t create at all. Obviously, it was a sad time. But towards the end of that year, I realised I needed to do something. I didn’t want to lose that creative part of myself. So I picked up my sketchbooks, got some new materials, and started going out walking, drawing what I saw on location.
I thought, this is what I should be doing. This is what makes me happy. It brought back the sense of purpose I had lost that year.
Grasslands in Spring, 2022
Jo Rance
Acrylic and gouache on paper, 21 x 30 cm | 8.2 x 11.8 in
I was in the garden the other morning, and our poppies from last year had come up, and we could see that they were going to bloom. One of them still had its green head on and it had split. We were waiting for this gorgeous poppy to come out, and lo and behold, it did. It’s just a good little metaphor for slowing down in life and, you know, actually taking joy in small things.
Beneath the Cedar Tree, 2025
Jo Rance
Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 90 cm | 27.5 x 35.4 in
I think it’s funny when people don’t have this connection with nature and don’t view us as part of it. When you really look at trees, for example, you look at their bark, and they genuinely have eyes on them. I think it’s just such a natural extension to use my hands to relay what I’ve seen in our natural world. Going out walking, spending time in nature, it is very cliche, but it’s so calming, it’s so fulfilling. You’re never going to get home from a walk in the outdoors and feel worse for it.
Walking Down the Lane, 2025
Jo Rance
Acrylic and acryla gouache on panel, 40 x 50 cm | 15.7 x 19.6 in
The lack of figures and animals in my work is genuinely quite a practical result of the way that I work and what I choose to paint. I only really want to paint what I’ve actually seen. I’m more focused on the naturescape; the trees and the grasses and the water and all of those things that I can see.
Once Upon a Time on the Forest Floor, 2023
Jo Rance
Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 90 cm | 27.5 x 35.4 in
I approach a painting from back to front, and it is very much like a jigsaw. I kind of deconstruct the landscape in my mind before I start the painting so that I know what needs to come first. First, I start with an underpainting of a wash and and usually that’s quite a warm pink or sometimes like a pale lilac blue. Then I’ll build the painting with bigger shapes, so I might put in the bigger expanses of shapes for trees and map out the land. And then I’ll be thinking okay, what’s coming next, where does that foliage lie, or where are the lines of the trees going? With every new shape and layer there’s a slight gap between where each shape sits, so you can almost see how it’s been built. There’s always an element of what came before it still on the painting.
There is a nice harmony between working outdoors and working in the studio. When I’m working outside, I’m never too precious. I don’t intend to finish masterpieces. It’s very much part of my process – kind of keeping this magic and this connectivity to the landscape and what I’m working on. You never want to become too disconnected from your subject. When I’m going out to paint, I normally just take a rucksack for ease, sometimes a little tote bag. I’ve also got a little mat that I can sit on if the ground’s a bit wet.
I’ll have a few sketchbooks, because if I’ve painted in one, my nature is that I just want to do the next thing, and I don’t want to wait for it to dry. So I can work on another piece or lay paint backgrounds down and do a few at a time. So the colours also align. I also take a few tubes of paint because you never know how much you’re going to use. Working outdoors has a magic to it that can’t be replicated in an indoor setting like the studio. But obviously the studio is way more set up for kind of focused work when I’m working on bigger scale pieces. I can spend more time really looking at these photos that I might’ve taken, seeing what I want to put in the painting, and thinking about colour more.
The Lakes but in My Mind, 2022
Jo Rance
Pen, pastel, and pencil on paper, 21 x 30 cm | 8.2 x 11.8 in
My sketchbook practice really revolves around what I’m drawing when I’m out on location – sitting, sketching, painting outdoors. It becomes this kind of archive of your brain, filled with thoughts that might not seem cohesive at the time. But when you look back with fresh eyes, you start to see the connections. They become a sort of bank of visual knowledge that feeds into future work.
Undated Drawing
Jo Rance
When it comes to using mediums, sometimes I use a tiny bit of acrylic flow medium so that it’s easier to cover a larger area with small marks. But overall, I just tend to dilute my acrylics with water because it’s very easy to get different transparencies. I also use some more flat mediums like acrylic gouache and Lefranc & Bourgeois Flashe Vinyl Emulsion Paint.
I do take a lot of photos when I’m out and about, especially if I haven’t had time to actually sit down and draw. I’ll then print them out and that’s what I work from. There is no digital manipulation, no editing. It’s kind of my most organic way of, you know, limiting the amount of steps between seeing the landscape and then painting it when you don’t have the time to paint it there and then. As long as it’s something that I’ve seen and I’ve experienced, and then I’ve taken the photo of, I can still relate to what I’m painting.
To Walk Beside You, 2024
Jo Rance
Acrylic and acryla gouache on panel, 40 x 50 cm | 15.7 x 19.6 in
I almost paint my landscapes as if there isn’t an edge to the canvas or the board or the panel that I’m working on. I work across both canvas and board, wooden board. I don’t really have a preference. I like them equally. Canvas can have that natural texture that lends itself quite nicely to landscape painting because of the organic texture that you see in nature anyway. But working on board and wooden panels can be a nice change because the canvas can be quite absorbent, and if you don’t have a lot of fluidity to the paint you’re using, it can drag sometimes.
My studio space is at the front of a warehouse, so I’ve got a lot of space. It’s definitely not the kind of garden studio of my dreams that hopefully will come later in life, where I can hear birds singing and, you know, wander down the garden path. It’s not really that vibe right now, but I’m still very grateful for it. There is natural light, but in the winter months, I do have to rely on artificial light, which has its challenges. To have any space to paint is an ultimate privilege in my mind, so I’m always just grateful to be able to show up somewhere and not have to tidy everything away.
A typical day for me in the studio can look different depending on what I’m doing. A lot of the time, when I’m really into a body of work or a collection, or I’ve got deadlines and I’ve got paintings that need to be done, I do stick to quite a traditional kind of working day. I think because my partner works a normal job, I feel like it’s good for me. It’s good for me to have that structure and kind of accountability as well. And because the studio is out of my house, it means it kind of keeps me in sort of normal daily life in a way. I’ll normally just be painting all day, basically. Sometimes I forget to eat lunch because I’ll just be cracking on, and kind of in that flow.
One thing that is non-negotiable when it comes to painting is having a spinning chair. I’m constantly kind of moving around and fidgeting, and I don’t really ever stand when I’m painting, but I still want to be able to move. So I’m kind of like whizzing around my studio on this spinning chair.
In terms of what I listen to when I’m painting, I do love a podcast. My taste is very varied, and if something interests me, then I’ll listen to it, whether it’s kind of a popular culture type of thing or whether it’s a nature or gardening podcast. I’ve recently gotten into gardening podcasts because of the season and the time of year we’re in. But I’m also guilty of having reality TV on in the background, which I know does not align with painting landscapes and probably in general being a painter. I think my taste should probably be a little bit more highbrow, but I love reality TV programs, and yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit it.
I use a lot of synthetic tapered brushes just because they work well with the acrylic paint that I use. But natural bristle brushes are a huge part of my secondary painting process after I’ve laid out the flatter shapes of colour. I use those with quite minimal amounts of paint to stipple and create these kinds of more bristly marks that are more reminiscent of nature and trees. So there’s this marrying of smooths and texture, which I think is probably then quite apparent in the final paintings.
Walking Through Snowdrops, 2025
Jo Rance
Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60 cm | 9.6 x 23.6 in
I prefer a short-handled paint brush just because I like the control it gives me. A denser, bristly brush can be nice to really be intentional with where the marks are going. I tend to lean more towards rounded brushes, sometimes slightly tapered. They’re quite good for creating specific shapes and getting in close. And I would never be without a really tiny precision brush for those really small grass marks that I feel like you couldn’t replicate with another kind of tool.
I’d say most of my paintings end up in the corner of my studio at some point, where I can’t even look at them because I think they’re that ugly. And that’s okay. If you wait a few days and come back to them, you see them differently, and things start to make more sense. I think it’s important just to take a step back and give it a little bit of time.
For me, I know a painting is finished just before I think it’s finished. I sometimes think of that kind of sweet spot just before you think, okay, this is complete. That’s when it will be finished because sometimes those slight tweaks that you can make can completely change the composition or feeling of the painting to make it, especially with landscape work as well, just feel that bit too done.
I love going to exhibitions. My favourite painters include Milton Avery, Fairfield Porter, Vanessa Bell, and, of course, David Hockney. I don’t think you can argue with David Hockney’s spirit and joy for landscape. I love seeing old footage of him painting outside, and the kind of sheer joy and elatedness that he has for our natural world, it’s infectious. And it’s something that really stays with me, especially in relation to spring. I always come back to his connection to the land, the way that he translates it in his paintings.
The Long Way Home
I think when it comes to painting, and to be honest, anything that you’re gonna do in life, if you do it with integrity and with the intention of joy, I think you’re pretty set. If you’re doing something that makes you happy and brings you joy, keep doing it. Because by doing that, without you even realizing it, you’re putting good energy and you’re radiating those vibes that everyone needs more of anyway into the world. And it all bounces back, it’s all cyclical.
A Chance of April Showers, 2025
Jo Rance
Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 50 cm | 15.8 x 19.7 in
Further Reading
The Variation in Acrylic Paint Viscosity
How to Resolve a Landscape Painting Composition
The Blocking In Technique for Painting and Drawing
Lessons Learned From My Outdoor Painting Session – A Plein Air Painting Journal
Shop Art Materials on jacksonsart.com
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