Jane Kent has made two silkscreen editions and twenty-eight unique monotypes with Aspinwall Editions. Her images and practice are both erudite and playful. She meticulously plans and constructs her compositions, making use of a new visual vocabulary for each series, yet her works still exude a refreshing spontaneity and embrace the element of chance.
 
For her screenprints Blue Nose and Pink Eye, Kent used the silhouettes of unfolded cardboard packaging as her starting point to build compositions of layered and juxtaposed shapes (both hard-edged and painterly) and colors (warm and cool). The resulting images are strikingly distinctive, and she succeeds in her wish to make something “you can’t take your eyes off.”
 
Kent’s vibrant monotypes are made up of many layers of colors printed with the use of hand-cut masking stencils. While working on her 2018 series Endless I–XXI, she would contemplate questions such as, “What does four o’clock look like?” or “What time do these colors feel like?” prompting us to reevaluate our perception of time and the features of various timepieces—commonplace clocks and watches, lunar calendars, hourglasses—that record and represent it.
 
Kent’s 2020 works feature two new subjects, a lamp (Big Top) and a pair of fire extinguishers (Side by Side), and also return to the unfolded packaging motif (Red Eye). Again, the arrangement of form and color is the driving force behind these works that call to mind Henri Matisse’s cut-outs and the work of Patrick Caulfield.
 
Kent (born in New York) received her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Rare Books Division and the Drawing and Prints Division, the Library of Congress; the Spencer Collection, the New York Public Library; the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University Library; the Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Fellowships and awards include the National Endowment for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship; the Barbara and Thomas Putnam Fellowship, MacDowell Colony; and Yaddo Artists’ Fellowship. She is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont.