Alumnae Profile

Jane Fleck Eccles ’54

Jane Fleck Eccles ’54 lives on Cape Cod with a view of the water. Unless a Nor’easter is bearing down or summer rain threatens to drench her supplies, Jane, a landscape artist, ventures out once or twice a week to capture a natural world of shifting dunes and shorelines.

Working mainly with pastel chalks and, more recently, oil paints, Jane is grateful for the timeless land and seascapes offered up in all seasons near her East Orleans home. But it is her work with handmade paper that last winter garnered international attention at the Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea in Florence, Italy.

Jane Fleck Eccles ’54 exhibited her handmade paper in Florence last year.

One of 768 artists selected for the United Nations “Partners for Peace” event, Jane shipped three pieces of her colorful work to the exhibition site in the historic Fortezza da Basso, and then traveled to Europe to join in the Biennale festivities—including a tribute to Christo. “The experience was wonderful,” says Jane. “[U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan proclaimed that ‘…artists have a special role to play in the global struggle for peace.’ We had something of that sense as we returned from the Florence Biennale.”

A Pittsburgh native, Jane came to Mount Holyoke to study philosophy. She did, but was ultimately swept away by art history and the influence of Edward Corbett, a California abstract painter who taught at the College from 1953 until 1962. “I did large, abstract paintings that were four by six feet,” she recalls of her early work. But it was difficult to carve out the big blocks of time required for that kind of painting after she began a family—she and her husband have three boys—so Jane began to study etching and printmaking. Those arts, she explains, “I could do in a fragmented way.”

Jane found that her interest in the various qualities of printmaking paper naturally led to an interest in making paper. She relished the spontaneity of the process. Working at a New York City papermaking facility with other artists, she also enjoyed the collaborative process of papermaking and the atelier atmosphere.

But geographic change was to redirect her pursuits. She and her husband moved to the Cape in the early 1990s, where few artists were papermaking. So Jane began to concentrate on pastels and oils. What hasn’t changed is a life rich in varied family and artistic endeavors. “I have no regrets,” says the artist.

—M.B.

Everything you need to take the next step is already in your life, if you will but look carefully for it. — Penny Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of the Humanities and professor of politics, baccalaureate address, 1993