Jane Evans' love of colour and drawing manifested itself early when, aged four, she drew a menagerie of people and animals on her bedroom walls. She drew incessantly at Nelson College for Girls and won the South Island Secondary Schools' Cup in 1961.

While art school was the obvious choice, her art teacher, Ruth Dean, was concerned her individuality might be lost. When she enrolled at the University of Canterbury's School of Fine Arts in 1965, Evans was already an excellent draughtswoman and a painter with a vigorous, immediate approach.

In 1966, Evans entered Waltham Forest Art School, near London, where at the end of the first year, her principal said she would have learnt more without 'the obstinate pursuance of her own ideas." She left and began a programme of self-education in England. Evans returned to a flat in Deans Ave, Christchurch in December 1967. A painting trip through Central Otago saw her produce 12 expressionist canvases, which sold for $14 each in 1969.

Encouraged by her parents, Evans moved back to Nelson in 1971 to be close to family support. In 1972 Evans spent some time in Sydney and Melbourne, painting the colourful characters of Kings Cross and setting up a studio in Melbourne. In 1974 she spent three months in the UK and was intensely interested in watching and painting the people thronging London's galleries and markets.

Evans bought and renovated a cottage in Tasman Street in 1975. She established a garden and began a series of flower paintings, which satisfied her love of colour and instinct for decorative painting.1 At this time she experimented with gouache, a less physically demanding medium than oils and acrylics, which she also liked for aesthetic and technical reasons.

"The garden was an extension of my life in those days. When I turned to watercolours I found myself in touch with this wonderful, loose, spontaneous medium that was really exciting."

Evans loved the lyrical, full bodied colour of the early Expressionists such as Matisse, Bonnard and Chagall.

"My paintings are celebrations, expressions of delight in my immediate environment and the people and events that touch my life."