Acclaimed Artist Jane Lillian Vance To Premier New Works at Gallery Opening in Downtown Roanoke

"Disarmament" was painted by Jane Vance in the days surrounding the one year anniversary of Morgan Harrington's disappearance. Morgan was a student of Jane's at Tech and was scheduled to travel to Nepal with her this past summer.

Artist, Jane Lillian Vance, announced plans to premiere several recently completed works at the February 3rd public opening of her new gallery located at 309 1st Street in Roanoke.  Excitement has been building in recent weeks as passers by have watched the downtown gallery space come to life with nearly 100 brilliantly colored paintings and a festoon of Buddhist Prayer Flags.   Several of the 8ft x 10ft signature works featured in the gallery have never been shown in public and several others from private collections will be on display opening night.

The gallery opening follows a flurry of international interest in Vance’s paintings after her work was featured in the documentary “A Gift for the Village” produced by Jenna Swann and Tom Landon.  The film chronicles seven friends as they traveled from the Blue Ridge Mountains to a village in western Nepal to deliver a painting by the artist about Tsampa, a Tibetan amchi-lama-doctor and mind-healer.  Jane Lillian Vance is the first woman and first westerner to be granted permission to produce such a piece.  The team was welcomed with an elaborate festival celebrating the artist, the work and the man it honors.  A Gift for the Village documents the remarkable story of their trip — offering unprecedented access to a vanishing tradition.  The film’s US premier was held at the Taubman Museum of Art in September of 2010 where it received standing ovations at both sold out screenings.

“Over 400 people attended the reception at the US premiere where I shared several paintings that appeared in the film,” said Jane Vance.  “Following that evening, there were so many requests to view the larger body of my work – a gallery seemed the most logical next step.”

Jane Lillian Vance’s highly narrative, Tibetan-focused and studiously detailed oil paintings have always been concerned with bridging the space between East and West but went largely without public notice, until several years ago when internationally acclaimed art critic Suzi Gablik visited Vance and began their great friendship, writing about her paintings in Satish Kumar’s Resurgence magazine, and in Images of Earth and Spirit, an English anthology of spiritual contemporary art.

“They are gorgeous and spectacular and they are powerful,” says Gablik.  “Engaging and alluring.”

The February 3rd Jane Lillian Vance Gallery opening will include The Honorable Scott DeLisi, Ambassador to Nepal who hosted the World Premiere at his home in Katmandu in the summer of 2010.

“Ambassadors are charged, among other things, with building bridges between cultures and societies,” wrote Ambassador DeLisi in remarks offered at the Taubman Premiere.  “Jane and Jenna and the others who created A Gift for the Village are true Ambassadors.”

Vance lives in Blacksburg, Virginia where she is currently adjunct professor of The Creative Process through the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, as well as a public school aide for middle-school-aged children with special needs.  She adores her two children, daughter, Iris Lillian Vance and son, Emerson Arthur Siegle.  When they were young, she spent a year in New Delhi, India, and another year in Kandy, Sri Lanka, home-schooling her children and researching South Asian art. Vance continues to create paintings with brilliant detail, vivid iconography of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, and the folk arts of the Subcontinent as well as the Appalachian Blue Ridge Mountains. Her paintings are in private collections on four continents.

For information about Jane Lillian Vance visit: http://www.janevance.com

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