Jane Davies is a full time artist working in painting and collage. She offers workshops nationwide, focusing on developing a personal and playful approach to art making.

After graduating Bennington College and attending the School for American Crafts, Davies began as a potter in the early nineties. She transitioned into freelance art, using painting and collage as her medium.

Since 2010 she has been teaching, writing, and making art. She participated in a residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2015. In addition to The Elements of Visual Language, Davies is the author of three books on collage and mixed media, one on ceramics, has one DVD on painting and collage techniques. Her work is available at Edgewater Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont, and Sheldon Fine Art in Newport, Rhode Island.

Color, line, shapes, splashes, textures, patterns – the components of visual language - are my gateway drug, along with the sheer yumminess of art materials. I’m hooked on the process of playing with paint-paper-crayon-ink-graphite and exploring the expressive possibilities.

Always seeking visual surprises, my method is to group elements that don’t ‘go together’ in a mixy-matchy way. I try to put together disparate elements, as if they washed up on the beach in a random arrangement, and then see how they speak to each other.

The theme of cobbling together something new and meaningful from discards and remnants runs through my most recent work, like traditional quilts made from worn out clothing. My processes include sanding, soaking, cutting, gluing, and other techniques to transform old paintings and found papers, into parts for reassembly.

Working in this way makes me present to the continual destruction, transformation, and reconfiguration that happens all around us all the time; it is my way of processing the recent upheavals in our lives. I wonder if we can salvage the remnants of our planet while we fail to adequately address climate change. Can we re-build or re-think social, cultural, and political institutions in this time of intense division and uncertainty, or at least patch together something workable?