Jane Dell is a contemporary American artist and painter who combines imagery and inventive abstracted forms in her free-flowing, colorful surreal landscapes and figurative collage paintings. Organic shapes blend and contrast with geometric or imagined worlds using hard edge techniques with gestural brushwork bordering, at times, on conceptual themes. She makes sense of chaos and order in nature and her life. She's interested in the intersection of the two; the ever-shifting boundaries. Influenced by the unpredictable aspects of life, she finds beauty in unexpected places. Her process is intuitive and experimental, and often starts with a loose idea, then allows the materials to guide the work as it evolves.


 
"Jane Dell’s paintings and works on paper are a pithy and magical blend of
abstraction and figuration, of glorious color and mutating forms, and of
seductive fantasies and unsettling dreams.What really excites me about Dell’s art are the possibilities inherent in each work for exploration, both
viscerally and metaphysically."

Curator/Artist, Judith Page 2013

"....But Dell isn't without undercurrents of angst and ennui. The acrylic collage on canvas "Trouble in Paradise" has a lone figure amid beautiful flora and fauna and a fish eye next to a window. The surroundings are opulent, seductive and vacant. Its reserved demeanor more than merely suggest things aren't quite right, but it doesn't yell, or throw a tantrum. 
Dell's compositions, made with acrylic and collage on canvas, or watercolor, ink, photography, collage on Mylar, are aqua environments with starfish spinning, urchins scuttling, frogs grinning and plants swaying. 
On the surface, they're placid pictures of a harmonious world submerged in water.
Beneath, they're anything but comforting. Dell's images have a detectable tension subtly suggested through palette and composition. 
Through various critters, keenly mixed and matched, interacting in their watery world, a tranquil existence seems to be on the edge much like the quiet before the storm. This is where Parsons and Dell connect and make an engaging exhibit."

Tim Kane is a freelance writer for the Albany Times 2014