Mid - century Modern Artist - Jane Ruggiero, 50 has battled Bipolar Disorder since the age of 12, using her powerful mainly female portraits to explore the challenges of Bipolar. The part that is sad or broken, is what Jane explores.
Strongly influenced by the life story of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Ruggiero’s work explores both suffering and Joy.
Many of her works render the female face , divided by the black, with clown-like eyes and pink cheeks which, Ruggiero explains, represent “the mask that I put up, though less and less so, in order to make my husband, family and friends happy.
From the hills of Adelaide, Ruggiero featured as both an actor and singer, on the Adelaide Amateur scene. She studied for two years at the Flinders Drama Centre, later studied acting at the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts. She graduated from WAAPA and moved to Sydney. After seven years working in television, film and theatre in Sydney she returned to Adelaide where she began painting (as a means of healing from breakdown). Melancholic eyes contrast with bright pink cheeks "outward happiness and inward pain and, yes, more and more inward happiness, too”, she says.Her unique style echoes the dynamism of the German Expressionist movement and, too, the simplicity of Naïve Art.