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.


Her mixed media collage paintings reveal compositions and imagery that blur the lines between balance and disorder, reality and surrealism, using provocative photos and images from her photo archives, decorative papers and magazine photos she composes them within a layered painted surface. Compositions start to emerge that reveal an inner life of dreamlike scenes and unusual juxtapositions of forms that suggest imagined stories and myths that challenge the perception of the physical and visual realms. 

 
"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