Jan Avellana | Art + Words

The Story of a Girl.

I have always been an artist. It first made itself known in elementary school through writing and at the time, I didn’t equate art and writing together at all, and did not feel the least bit precious about writing, so much so, that I kind of threw it away for a long time. In college, I picked up writing again and took my first art course. I was hooked at the start and stacked up art credits and studio classes like overdue library books. In time, I finished college with a BFA and practiced graphic design for several years. There were parts that lit me up inside, but many more parts of that career that deadened me, though I did not know myself enough yet to understand why.

Fast forward to a Master’s in Teaching, two children, a diagnosis of clinical depression and over a decade later and I found myself slowly wading back into the art studio again to save myself. Teaching was my new career and it brought with it misery times a thousand. I couldn’t articulate to anyone, including myself why, but the ceramics studio is where I found relief from the internal emotional pain that could not be named, for a few hours each week. All I knew was that when I was covered in mud, I felt happy. Slowly, I returned to artmaking through jewelry design, painting and collage, while I watched my babies grow.

Bringing my art together into a body of work that felt true to all the different people living inside this 5 foot 0 inch frame has been crazy-making. For eons, nothing satisfied completely, not even words. The thing is, I was trying so hard to separate everything into singular compartments that conformed to one style and one medium. And the funny thing is, the answer seems to have been there all along, right there under my nose. My new body of patchworked collage paintings are a way of bringing all of my disparate parts together in a way that lets me say yes to all the arty things I love—gouache, acrylic, painting, typography, collage and words. And I have to chuckle quietly to myself that the parts are in their own little compartments. The peas aren’t touching the mashed potatoes! So here I am. All my loves gathered up—but each element has their own story to tell. My art is a patchwork of everything that ever happened to me and also the things that didn’t, the lovely sum of this girl’s 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.

On Becoming.

“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and loike books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~Maria Rainer Rilke

For so very long now (if you’ve been following along--hello!), I’ve been beside myself because I can’t seem to find my place in this world no matter how hard I try, no matter even, how much I think I’ve surrendered. I’m not fully at home in the classroom, not fully at home in the commercial art world either…but alone in the studio is where I feel true.

I treasure up in my heart, the silent conversations I have with myself through creative mess making. I confront and lean into the questions that plague me—what kind of artist am I, will I ever be able to do this full-time, except for my studio, why is it that I never feel at home anywhere? I listen for the answers. I climb the mountain to see what I can see. Artmaking helps me find out what’s inside of me—how tenacious am I really? Artmaking helps me become.

I am riddled with insecurities and a pervasive feeling of lostness, trying to straddle the responsibilities of real life and the life I live inside my head that makes its way into countless stacks of sketchbooks. In the studio, I give myself space and margins that don't exist in my real life and along the way, I find bits of myself. 

This new series that I’m developing is just that—tiny snippets, parts of me that are coming together to make a whole. Each image tells a story, each number and color and pattern says something about me. Thoughts and wishes caught on paper. Tiny images that seemed insignificant by themselves and headed for the scrap pile now reflect back to me parts of a whole. This is who I am. I am becoming and patchworking myself together one bit at a time. Each part holds something important for me to know, each piece has something to tell me. It's my way of living the questions. 

Original for sale in my Etsy shop soon (if I’m brave)! xo