Artist Member
al • le • giance
13 x 10.75 x .75″, 20 pages
Hand-lettered in ink, gouache, acrylic, woven Tyvek, colored Hollytex on Katie McGregor handmade paper, Coptic sewn book, book cloth on binders board, linen thread, book cloth covered box
Illuminated Night
19 x 21.5″ open
Hand-lettered in ink and acrylic on 6 sheets of Hark! handmade paper, indigo dyed paper, Hollytex polyester, linen thread, sewn book, cloth covered portfolio case
We Hold
14 3/8 x 11 x 1″
3 signatures with inserts, board covers, hand-lettered in sumi and walnut ink and acrylic on Cave handmade paper, Fairchild and Lana Laid papers, painted Hollytex, with painted, woven Tyvek, Coptic binding, box
Jan Owen
www.JanOwenArt.com
BIO
Jan Owen is a calligraphic artist in Belfast, Maine. Her unique, hand-lettered artist’s books contain lots of words. Born in NYC, she moved to Maine after college working as a printmaker and graphic designer. With the birth of twin daughters, she started teaching herself calligraphy and went on to study and then teach lettering and book arts.
Her artist book, Requiem, was a finalist in the Books that Matter prize at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Her book Wonder, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Stephen Harvard Book Prize by the Maine Baxter Society. She was twice awarded Maine Artist Fellowships.
Owen’s work is in the National Museum of Women in the Arts; Washington, DC; Jack Ginsburg Centre for Book Arts, South Africa; The Walker Library of the History of Human Imagination, CT; Portland Museum of Art, ME; Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, WA; Library of Congress and in many private collections and library Special Collections.
For many years, her other interest was playing string bass with orchestras wherever she was living. The connection of practicing the bass and calligraphy are close and lead to the performance and the blank page.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I have always collected words by copying poems, dog-earing books, and photocopying pages. And I drew. Working as a graphic designer, I wanted more choice and so taught myself calligraphy learning the historic styles. Drawing letters, I began making artist’s books.
From the words, themes will emerge and I match writers so that Walt Whitman can have a conversation with John Tagliabue; or what do I want to learn about the Constitution? I now write my own words as small marginalia adding my comments to the page. Working on unique handmade papers, I want to call your attention to these words by adding brush marks, woven shapes and illustrations, as well as binary code. When trying to understand how my computer worked, I saw the patterns of 1’s and 0’s, bits and bytes, how we primarily read today.
Besides the visual, artist’s books affect time and touch; time that it takes to turn the pages, to read and to notice. Touch in the feel of handmade paper as you open, unfold and turn the pages. My computer holds far more information but an artist’s book is an object to engage the senses and the mind.