Jane Mackay was born in London in 1947 and spent many of her early years in Cambridge. As a child she was a prolific painter and intrigued by rudimentary chemistry experiments in the family kitchen, she also immersed herself in the sciences. She attended King's College, London, and Westminster Medical School where she helped to found an annual Arts Festival.

After qualifying as a doctor in 1970 she volunteered for a post in Papua New Guinea, returning to London in 1976 to practise as a GP.

Her parallel career as an artist has evolved along a similarly unconventional path. Though her choice of subjects is wide-ranging her main passion is the painting of music. Fascinated by the relationship between the visual and auditory parts of the brain, she captures, and commits to paper, the images she visualises when listening to music. She has found these "synaesthetic" images a constant source of creative inspiration, together with her love and knowledge of the classical repertoire, fundamental to her life as an artist . She is both a choral singer and an oboist. Jane is best known for her "Britten Series" paintings, over two hundred of which are distributed in collections worldwide. She relinquished medicine at the New Millennium in order to pursue her artistic career full time.

Jane has exhibited extensively in the UK including solo shows at the Salisbury and Aldeburgh Festivals, at London's Wigmore Hall and at the RNCM Broadwood International Festival in Manchester. Since February 2000 she has exhibited frequently at the Watercolours and Drawings Fair (Park Lane Hotel), Art on Paper (Royal College of Art), the Art and Antiques Fair (Spring Olympia at Earl's Court) and the Chelsea Art Fair. During the academic year 2000/2001 she was Artist in Residence with the Cambridge University Musical Society, with two major exhibitions in Cambridge during this residency. In 2002 she had solo exhibitions at the Royal School of Church Music, Dorking and St. John's, Smith Square, London and in December 2003 she was invited to exhibit her work at the Florence Biennale. In 2004, Jane held solo shows in Ludlow and Aldeburgh, both exhibitions coinciding with music festivals in these venues.

Her work has attracted considerable media attention and has been featured in the Times, Telegraph, Observer and Evening Standard newspapers and the BBC Online News. She has also appeared on TV several times recently, including 'This Morning with Richard and Judy' (Granada) and 'Come To Your Senses' with Adam Hart-Davis (BBC 2). She has taken part in a film for visitors at the newly opened Handel House Museum, and recorded interviews for BBC Radio 4 and Discovery TV (2002); and BBC2 Horizon and Icon Films for Channel 4 (2004).

Jane paints from her studio, a converted loft overlooking the rooftops and gardens of South London. Whilst she focuses mainly on her music paintings, current commissions also include designs for greetings cards, poetry books and stained glass windows.