Artist Spotlight: Jan Edwards
The Naples Art District is known in Florida and around the world as the home of the largest concentration of working artists in Southwest Florida. The District enjoys highlighting member artists and their work via their Artist Spotlight! series. This week the District presents Jan Edwards.
Jan Edwards is a professional creative—an “artist’s artist” with experience across the field of fine arts. She has had a successful career in advertising and illustration—way back, she was a fashion illustrator in retail advertising. Her work was mainly in ink, watercolor, charcoal, and pencil. She has also tried her hand at printmaking and mono printing, has dabbled in bronze casting and clay, and has painted mostly with acrylics and watercolors with a plan to experiment with oils and explore encaustic wax. Jan says she wants to get back to the kind of figurative painting she did as a fashion illustrator to incorporate it into her new work.
Jan has made Naples home for several years. A native Minnesotan, Jan divides her time between Florida, Nashville, Tennessee, and Missoula, Montana. She is a professional Creative Director with a career spanning graphic design, illustration, and photo direction for some of the most iconic retail brands. But she has always been an experience maker and expressed her creative spirit through art, writing/songwriting, and music performance.
In May 2021, Jan opened the doors to Musebox Arts in Naples, Florida, where she plans to focus all her artistic efforts. Musebox Arts is a mixed experience space that provides a home for her studio workroom, atelier, and salon, to celebrate the muses that inspire her art. The unique environment has been designed to feature art, music, events, and performance in an intermedia immersive gallery that encourages everyone to find their own inspiration and muses. Jan’s artistic influences include Alice Neel, Cecily Brown, Milton Avery, Lisa Golightly, and several others.
Jan reveals that, outside of art, she has another passion: songwriting. “I’ve been a musician forever; and in the early 2000s, I started spending time in Nashville, living there part-time since then.” She has co-written songs with many people all over the world, in genres including country, jazz, Americana, and blues. She even has had a number one song entitled “I Will” in the Texas country market (which is bigger than the entire Canadian market!) for three consecutive weeks in the early spring of 2021, recorded by the artist Darrin Morris who continues to perform it. “I also write for film and TV and have a few songs being considered for airplay in some upcoming projects,” Jan shares. She also says she is a “closet interior designer,” noting a love for designing her own spaces and participating in architectural projects of any kind. It’s a form of artistic expression that’s in her blood, she acknowledges, that is linked to the family business, EDCO Products, Inc., which is a manufacturer of exterior residential and light commercial steel building materials.
To learn more about Jan Edwards and her view of the world, you can visit her website or Instagram page, or her creative space in the Naples Art District—Musebox Arts can be found at 5880 Shirley Street #208. Musebox Arts is open during the Naples Art District events (First Wednesdays or Third Saturdays) and by appointment.
The Naples Art District (NAD) is a place for professional artists like Jan to share their art and artistic process in working studios and galleries that are open to the public, for the exhibition of their work. NAD also provides educational opportunities and special events focused on the fine arts for the local community. The Artist Spotlight! series provides an opportunity for NAD member artists to connect with people and inspire them through their creativity. The NAD calendar of events, classes, and workshops offered by member artists can be found online by anyone interested in meeting and learning more from the artists of the District. Contact the Naples Art District online or by phone at 239-249-1977 for more information.
Jan Edwards
Musebox Arts
5880 Shirley St, Suite 208, Naples, FL
April 26, 2021 – April 30, 2021