Jane Balshaw is a fourth-generation artist who learned her craft through observation and experimentation. Over the years, she has worked in various artistic fields such as silversmithing, dressmaking, make-up artistry, aesthetics, styling, carpentry, and interior decorative arts. However, it was in the 1980s that she found her true passion for quilting.
Through her unique style of art, Jane merges her contemporary expression with time-honored craft traditions of cloth, needle, and thread, expressed through the eyes of a painter. She borrows tools and techniques from the old world decorative arts and implements the styles of The Masters executed with thought to the Golden Ratio.
Jane’s work is embellished with paper-making, felting, wood burning, and jewelers techniques, all coming together in the form of a stitched or quilted textile. Her artistic style is a result of merging her love of the earlier time period aesthetic with her love of modern expression. Jane’s hope is that her work, viewed with the collaboration of all these parts, promotes a feeling of awe and inspiration.
In her own words, “It has taken me years to hone in and merge my love of the earlier time period aesthetic with my love of a modern expression. It is my hope that when my work is viewed with the collaboration of all these parts that it promotes a feeling of awe and inspiration.”