Having grown up in the environment of contemporary art, with art colleges a part of her everyday life, it’s not a surprise that abstract elements of art - shape, color, texture, line, for example - are the things that excite Jane Davies’ visual sensibility. Today, she’s a full time artist working in encaustic, painting, and collage. She offers workshops nationwide and at her studio, where she focuses on helping people to find a playful and personal approach to art. She began as a potter in the early 90s, but later on, she moved to designing fabric, tableware, stationery, paper goods, and other products, using collage and painting as her medium. She believes that making art is a journey with only a general road map and very few hand-holds.
Each participant has to find his/her own way, but has to remain open to learn from others. She teaches a multitude of techniques, but her focus is on the back-and-forth play of intention and spontaneity that characterizes her creative process. For the past several years, she has put most of her efforts towards writing, teaching, and making art. She tries to pave the way into that precarious unknown zone, where, with guidance, she’s challenged to forge a personal path to discover the satisfaction of making art that is truly her own. Formal elements are her most important source of inspiration. She’s moved by a simple combination of line and color, or the relationships of edges and shapes, or the interplay between scale and pattern.
