MEET THE ARTIST

Samantha Jane Harrold was born in San Francisco. She moved with her military family from New Zealand to a small town in the Central Valley of California, surrounded by corn fields and family. 

​

Jane was introduced to charcoal pencils at a young age and her hunger for creating only got stronger. She painted, she wrote, she taught her siblings to draw, but mostly she enjoyed the solitude of making art on her own.

 

She became an Art Therapist because painting her emotions is what helped her cope with intergenerational trauma, and she realized she could help others the same way she helped herself. 

 

She moved to Los Angeles in 2013 to complete her graduate degree and has been here ever since, painting her emotions, disguised as portraits of whimsical children. Each painting is a wild part of herself, released into the world. She signs her work with “Jane,” her middle name, inherited by her great grandmother, who was also an artist.

​

When she isn’t painting her own feelings, she helps other queer folks and pattern breakers discover they have no bad parts, by offering trauma conscious somatic therapy, EMDR and Clinical Art Therapy through her telehealth only private practice Moth & Flame Therapy.

Jane's work captures the conflict between innocence and the wisdom that comes from pain, often depicting portraits of children with large and knowing eyes, that challenge the viewer to witness them, and in that way, witness themselves.

Jane loves light and texture, and painting exaggerated details of both, asking the viewer to notice the beauty in the ordinary and witness the world as she sees it, as a Highly Sensitive Person.

In her work you will likely find something you left behind-the eyes of your great grandmother, or your mother as a child, the feeling of knowing the world is bigger than your parents say it is, your trauma and your hope.

​

Feel it all, hold it close.

Jane believes, this is why we are alive.