Jane Kelly was a journalist with the Daily Mail for fifteen years and became the main feature writer, well known for her interviews with international celebrities. She was dismissed from her job after her painting of Myra Hindley If We Could Undo Psychosis 2 (see above) was exhibited in The Stuckists Punk Victorian show at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool in September 2004.

She has been painting seriously for ten years. She has taken part in numerous shows with the Stuckists and is founder of the Acton Stuckists group. She has been exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Show, the Sackville Gallery, London and the Excel Centre, Manchester, the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling and the Wolverhampton City Art Gallery. She has studied History and Fine Art at Stirling University, and taken an Advanced Painting Diploma at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

She has a preoccupation with The Holocaust, describing herself as a "post-holocaust painter". She has, for example, painted barbed wire from a concentration camp. After visiting Zandefort, a beach near Amsterdam, which Anne Frank used to frequent with her family on many occasions, Kelly painted a picture showing Anne Frank on the beach. The painting was auctioned at Sotheby's on April 28, 2006, in aid of trauma victims.

In April 2010, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and is blogging about it at icantbelieveitsreallycancer.blogspot.com.

Artist's statement on If We Could Undo Psychosis 2

"I've always been fascinated by Myra Hindley's disastrous life and because hers was the first horrible crime I knew about as a child. I wanted to see what she might have looked like in the kind of family situation she was always denied."

The Real Turner Prize 2004

Jane Kelly was the winner of the Stuckists Real Turner Prize 2004 for her painting If We Could Undo Psychosis 2, shown at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, as part of The Stuckists Punk Victorian show.

Press

Jane Kelly's Paul Dacre painting: The Guardian + image (22.8.07)

Jane Kelly in TV documentary on Daily Mail: The Guardian (20.8.07)

Interview with Jane Kelly on heyokamagazine.com (2005)

"Daily Mail sacks writer who painted Hindley picture" - Front page of The Guardian here (30.9.04)

"Journalist is sacked after exhibiting work at Walker" - the Liverpool Daily Post here.
Comment by Anthony Daniels on The Social Affairs Unit site here.

From the Independent (2.2.05)
Jane Kelly, the journalist and artist who was sacked as a feature writer by the Daily Mail, is paying tribute to her old boss. Kelly, who was dismissed last year shortly after unveiling a controversial portrait of the Moors Murderer Myra Hindley (now sold), has turned her talents to other subjects. "It's a canvas called Hated Fathers, and it is going to picture the faces of awful patriarchs," she tells me. "I'm including Earl Haig, who I think was responsible for sending so many young men to their death in the First World War; Chaim Rumkowsky, who ran a ghetto in Poland during the Second World War where all the inhabitants died; Peter the Great, who murdered his son; and Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail." No hard feelings, then.

Regarding her dismissal, Kelly has told us:
"I was never given a full reason for my dismissal but also got into trouble by trying to introduce the term "German expressionism" into some copy about the performing dwarves used in the MGM film, The Wizard of Oz, some of whom came from Weimar Germany. The acting feature editor at the time had never heard of such a thing and said "what the fuck is German Expressionism? I have never heard of it and neither have our fucking readers."