After thirty years as a special education teacher, Jan Bannister traded the classroom for a mountaintop studio in Colorado’s Coal Creek Canyon. There, the creativity she’d set aside for so long finally had room to grow.

Driven by curiosity and a love of the process, she moves between textured acrylic paintings, hand-printed tissue paper collage, and alcohol ink on ceramic. She reaches for palette knives, garden tools, or kitchen utensils in search of the right mark. The result is art that is bold, layered, and never quite the same twice, much like the Colorado landscape that inspires her.