Cobalt Blue
A Lifetime of Art

By Jane Graham
August 2008
Book Guild UK
Distributed by Coronet Books
ISBN: 9781846242441
441 pages, Illustrated, 9 x 8 1/2"
$34.50 paper original

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Cobalt Blue is an important addition to the art world's library, being the first time that a comprehensive cross-section of the work of Jane Graham has been published.

Born in England, Graham became a professional artist in the 1970s and exhibited a series of powerful abstract paintings, including The Goat and Black Sand Beach at the National Museum and Art Gallery in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1979, to critical acclaim. By the 1990s her reputation was assured, and was cemented by the remarkable Meeting Point exhibition in Townsville, Queensland, in 1991, which represented a fusion of her work as a painter and a sculptor. Representative pieces from both of these exhibitions are included here, along with many others, covering her output up to 2005.

Graham's work does not attempt to expound a great intellectual thesis; rather it records her spontaneous response to life around her. The most exciting examples of her art encourage the viewer to participate and need the viewer to make them live. She believes that art should not be set aside as something special, but considered as a valid part of everyday life. Vitality and a spirit of exploration buoy her work: a fact that the reader will be in no doubt about having read this book.


Like most artists Graham's art has always been an honest, if sometimes disguised, expression of herself. Her subject matter is derived from careful observation of the world around her and then moulded by her emotional experience. She has always been an adventurous artist.

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