Jane Kelly was born in
Charlton, London, and educated at
Pendeford High School,
Wolverhampton, and
Stirling University, where she graduated in 1978 in history and fine art. In 1995, she took an Advanced Diploma in Painting at the
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. In 2000, she exhibited in the
Royal Academy Summer Show. The same year, she was a guest artist of the
Stuckist art group, and in 2003 founded The Acton Stuckists group. Her own explanation of her painting in the show catalogue was: :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. In December 2006, her show,
Stupid English Men, was held in a
Brighton gallery, Art Café. Her painting of Tim Walker,
The Sunday Telegraph's theatre critic and diarist, was stolen from the gallery. In August 2007, she appeared in the documentary,
The Daily Mail Diet, on
Al Gore's
Current TV internet video site, where she showed a painting of
Daily Mail editor,
Paul Dacre behind a
prawn cocktail, which Kelly said represented "a little bit of taste, but very predictable, bland and no surprises—it's from a different age where people had a more limited palate", and that she had depicted him as a stern figure as he "loves the 50s he wants people to go back to a time of discipline". She explains the other figure in the painting: "The Mail has always been slightly prurient and a bit scared of sex and I wanted this figure to represent that—it's slightly nasty and a bit threatening." a diet, which Kelly considered, "dangerous—it would be like eating hamburgers and nothing else—you're starving yourself." ==Gallery==