Inspired by her travels to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Conservation areas of Tanzania. With an experimental approach, Coutts mixes layers of texture to capture speed, movement, light and pattern in her personal view of the wild.

In Jan’s paintings, the beasts have not been tamed, they retain their dignity and their mystery, they are not hunted, nature is still operating and there is no final outcome. The tension between the materials used on these canvases works to complement the movement of the subjects. The animals in these paintings are as elusive on canvas as they are in their natural habitat. They reveal and camouflage themselves through patterns in the mists and shadows in the sun, they hunt and flee beneath layers of texture, their journeys are mapped by eroded patches of gold, silver and bronze leaf.