Jan Clayton Pagratis paints with a balanced mixture of light and dark values to create colorful landscapes.  Her palette includes vibrant primary colors, rich golden tones, and brilliant greens.  Her compositions are multi-layered with light, producing many unusual shades.  Generous colors saturate her entire canvas.  The final product is a masterful presentation of an impressionistic vision of the world.  As the viewer, your eye moves effortlessly through the artist’s alternative world.  The journey through this land is not passive.  Because there is a European familiarity to Jan’s landscapes, you will be challenged to recall where you have seen some of these vistas.  In actuality they exist only in her mind. 

 

Using a palette combining orange, reds and violet pigments and emphasizing golden and ochre hues, Pagratis creates dramatic vertical landscapes with hints of a sapphire-blue sea in the distance and white paths winding quietly through the landscape. She evokes the serene spirit of remote Mediterranean villas, cottages and houses of worship, nestled amid palm fronds and Italian cypress trees.

 

 

A native of Miami, Florida, Jan currently lives in Savannah, Georgia.  She earned her BA from the University of Maryland and her MFA from George Washington University.  She began exhibiting in 1991 and has had numerous shows since then.  Her work is in over 20 public and private collections.  Jan has been featured in many publications.  Coastal Arts & Antiques states that Jan is an artist to collect.   Most recently, she has been featured on the cover of the September 2003 issue of Southern Living magazine.

 

Jan describes her work best with, “Carmine clouds, steel gray curbs, red clay rooftops; these are pieces of imagery that spill onto the canvas as I work.”