MEET JAN BANNISTER…
Mixed-media artist. Educator. Forever a student.
The Long Way Around…
As a special education teacher, Jan built her career on a particular kind of patience: meeting each student exactly where they were and finding the path that worked for them. Art was one of her most reliable tools. She carried it into her classroom, painted sets for the school drama club, and made sure her own children grew up surrounded by color. What she rarely made room for was her own work. Art lived in the margins of a full life and the desire to create became something she learned to set aside.
In 2014, Jan retired and moved to Colorado, following a dream she had carried for thirty years. She arrived without a studio, without a body of work, and without any certainty that she was an artist at all. What she did have, for the first time in her adult life, was time. And outside every window was a landscape that seemed to be waiting for a response.
Making Room…
Jan’s first studio was a corner of the guest bedroom. Her second was a cramped storage building on the property that came to be known as the “art shack”. She made it work for far longer than anyone thought she should. Eventually, the people who loved her decided she had outgrown it. They took the shack apart board by board and built her a true studio in its place. Somewhere in the hammering, the questions that had followed her for years began to loosen their grip. Am I good enough? Can I really call myself an artist? It is difficult to doubt your place in the world when someone has built you one.
In the Studio…
Today, from that studio in Coal Creek Canyon, Jan works across three distinct mediums, and each asks something different of her. Her acrylic paintings are built in rich, textured layers, the surface shaped as much by what she scrapes away as by what she adds. Her tissue paper paintings grow from patterns and textures she creates herself, gathered into collage until color and form settle into place. Her alcohol inks on ceramic are luminous and fluid, each set in a frame she builds by hand from reclaimed Colorado wood.
Across all three she follows curiosity more than any fixed plan, reaching for whatever will make the mark she’s after, whether it came from an art supply store or the garden shed.
Colorado runs through all of it, though less and less as a picture. For years Jan admired abstract art from a distance, unsure she had permission to try it. When she finally did, she fell hard. The aspens that once stood in careful, recognizable rows now arrive as flashes of white against fields of teal, ochre, and rust. The mountains are still there. She is simply painting how they feel instead of how they look.
Still a student, Always a teacher…
A decade into her practice, Jan is quick to say she is still learning and she means it as the highest respect she can pay her craft. She takes classes, studies the work of artists she admires, and seeks out new mediums for the challenge of beginning again. She is drawn most to the work that pushes back and it is in her abstract paintings and layered collages that she feels herself growing most.
It is the same lesson she spent three decades teaching: that learning is messy, that mistakes are part of the method, and that everyone deserves room to try. She has simply learned to offer herself the patience she once gave her students. Now she is bringing that lesson full circle, leading small art classes in her mountain community, with plans to offer more workshops in the years ahead.
For someone who spent so long setting her creativity aside, being an artist is not something Jan takes for granted. Every piece carries a little of that gratitude and a great deal of color.
