Collection: Linda Jane Smith Artist Biography and Art Gallery Collection

Linda Jane Smith, with a lively touch and feline fun, bridges the gap between fun art and fine art in her images. Smith's love of drawing began when she was quite young and is forever tied to the stories that inspire her and to the ones that she tells through her work. At age 16, Smith entered Bournville College of Art, in Birmingham, to study graphic design. It was here that Linda Jane Smith first began to experiment with her medium of choice, gouache. Discovering this medium has greatly informed Smith's artwork; the water-based paint can be thinned and applied as a translucent wash and built up layer by layer or brushed on in rich strokes of color. This allows, Linda Jane Smith to slowly build a piece from background to foreground, focusing on the fine details in her rich, narrative works, which humorously star cats in everyday human situations.

After art school, Linda Jane Smith began to organize exhibitions and sold some of her work to The Stable Gallery in London, which was also the site of her first major exhibition. She has had many since, and earned a fan base in England and abroad. Smith is inspired by illustrators such as Arthur Rackham and Nicola Bailey, who fill their compositions with incredible detail. She seeks to fill her own work with similar depth and collects images from magazines and books on interior design, antiques, architecture, and fabrics, which she uses as reference material when she's working on a new piece. Throughout her working years she constantly showed her work to publishers and The Halcyon Gallery in Birmingham regularly bought her work. As a result of this Washington Green asked her for a set of four small cat paintings and consequently she embarked on a publishing program with them.