Jan Avellana, Artist + Writer

Jan Avellana was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii and has always been part fish. Perhaps because her true form is a mermaid, she has never quite found her way in the hustle and bustle of a traditional life. 

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A wanderer at heart, Jan’s first creative inklings came through creative writing as a child. She was known to burrow herself away in snug, sunlit corners as she escaped into her world of books and writing. Much later, Jan discovered the visual arts, and found her wanderlust continued as she explored different media—collage, illustration, graphic design, painting, encaustic art and papier mache, just to name a few. Even today, she is most at home with wide open seas and vast landscapes that allow her to follow wherever her heart leads.

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Her newest body of patchworked collage paintings are a way of bringing all of her disparate parts together in a way that lets Jan say “yes!” to all the arty things she loves—gouache, acrylic, painting, typography, collage and words. All her loves bundled up together to tell a story—each element a part of her visual language. Jan’s art is a patchwork of everything that ever happened to her and also the things that didn’t, the lovely sum of her deepest fears and fondest hopes, images stitched together to tell a story full of meaning—bringing comfort and warmth in the telling of a life made up of scraps and treasures gathered through her wanderings.

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Jan is an elementary teacher by day, an artist and writer by night. She is always a mom to her boys Seth and Cody and her fur baby Radar, and partner-in-crime to her husband, Steve.

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