Jan is a practicing professional artist, who has painted all her life, and her work sells in galleries, art and craft venues, and during art trails from her home in Somerset.

She has found a particular affinity with the natural world, even from an early age, and it is these special moments of vision, of poetic truth, of enchantment, that she seeks to express in her work.

Jan loves the glowing medium of watercolour to portray this, and she has experimented widely in this field, both traditionally and often in unorthodox ways - discovering an enormous flexibility within the qualities of these paints.

They can be rich and deep, as well as used in bright translucent layers,and Jan often combines them with areas of coloured crayon drawing.

Jan's paintings are a celebration, and often contain figures and animals in landscapes that arise from close observation combined with imagination, invention, and intuition.A strong use of design and colour characterizes her work , and she emphasizes the importance of drawing as being an underlying strength to all visual work in whatever medium.

For twenty years Jan worked as a Children's Book Illustrator, books that first arose from her paintings, - and she worked free lance for at least thirty British Book Publishers including the well known names at this time.

During this period she also taught adults in colleges, visited schools, and in ' 97 joined the London Art College by writing and tutoring the Children's Illustration Course. This course proved very successful and Jan discovered that she could empathize with and help students, whatever stage of development they had reached. She also later on revised and tutored for some time , the Watercolour Course.

Because Jan is now painting from her own immediate ideas, within the surrounding landscape, she has now moved to re- writing and tutoring the Watercolour Course once more, where she believes and hopes her wide experience will enable a variety of people to find their own voice, their own way of working and lots of enjoyment and  fulfillment too!  and at whatever level they want to  practice.

More of Jan's work , exhibitions, and other details can be seen on her 
web site  www.jannesbittartwork.com