Having first worked in the medical research field, Jane Allensworth studied painting at the Art Students League in New York, New York, and then at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts School (now Glassell School), Houston, TX, under the influential tutelage of Dorothy Hood (1918–2000). Allensworth's career was rooted in South Texas, with four solo exhibitions at the storied art dealer Tibor de Nagy's Houston outpost between 1976 and 1981, three at the Galveston Arts Center between 1972 and 2014, a 1979 juried exhibition at Women and Their Work in Austin curated by Marcia Tucker, and many regional group shows.
Jane worked in light washes of acrylic to create luminous veils of color; she often employed masking techniques or graphite to create sharp surface markings that expanded the skin of color field painting beyond the atmospheric to allude to multidimensional planes. In reducing content to the basic line, she emphasized the metaphysical effects of color. Her works were often singled out in art reviews and juried competitions: esteemed critic and artist Peter Plagens selected her Chinese Vase Paintings as a winner in "The Amarillo Competition" of 1977. The year before, The Post's arts writer Mimi Crossley noted her work was akin to Mark Rothko's canvases in their ability to "produce a mood, a meditation, a state of reflection." Jane was never interested in the fumbling of context or biography, asserting, "It's the painting that counts, not who did it."
In a grouping of works on paper made in the last ten years of her life, linearity persists, but the interaction of shapes seems increasingly elemental and playful. Often haloed or back-lit, these wiggling volumes teem with life and light. Horizons and softly scumbled surfaces are interrupted by forms of equal parts structure and apparition. Jane expressed herself as a painter who related her creative process to that of a composer or poet.
Institutions that collected her work during her lifetime included A.T.&T., New York, NY; Arkansas-Louisiana Gas Co., Shreveport, LA; Beaumont Art Museum, Beaumont, TX; Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, Houston, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Ruska Instruments, Houston, TX; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; The University of Houston, Clear Lake, TX; Weingarten Realty, Houston, TX; among many others. Jane Allensworth's records are in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.
Above: Marcia Tucker (then Director of The New Museum of New York) curating the first statewide juried exhibition of women artists held in Texas: "Woman-In-Sight: New Art in Texas," Women & Their Work, Austin, TX, Fall 1979. Allensworth's paintings are pictured in the background, at right.
