Artist Jan Poynter’s studio is on the top floor of the in a house she designed and built, commanding a view of Howe Sound and overlooking a garden that provides ongoing subject matter for her paintings. It’s a wonder she can bring herself to leave the place.

After years of travel and a decade of commuting, Poynter can stay home by choice, and send her designs out over the internet to a host of international clients.

A North Vancouver native who arrived on the Coast in 1990 after an 8 ½ year sojourn in Australia, Poynter has made her living as a graphic artist since she designed her first T-shirt at the age of 17. After supplementing her native talent and the skills learned at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr School of Art and Design) with an upgrade in the latest computer technology, “I wound up with a job where I use pencil and paper to create designs all day.” Her detailed sketches for companies such as Innovations Giftware and Benaya Ceramics include a line of garden sculptures, and she designs molds for functional tableware, figurines, even tea lights. Part of her success is rooted in her years working in manufacturing, starting with a badge-and-button company in Australia at the age of 24. “I know the boundaries for fabrication, and this helps when creating a successful design” says Poynter.

Poynter’s accessible, representational designs are deeply rooted in her love of plants. Recently certified as a Master Gardener, she is moving into landscape design – a form of painting with flowers, as well as painting the flowers themselves. A very successful series – now on display at The Landing Gallery in Gibsons – illustrates her own brilliantly unstructured garden.

As a result of her garden’s influence, “I’m working with a new palette, experimenting with a new, more expressionist coloration,” she says. However, she notes that she paints the florals for which she is most noted “when I’m not able to get away from the house.”

Her paintings of rockscapes and native plant species have been translated by a Vancouver company for its California clients into a series of 20’ long panels, mounted with 40 small complimentary pieces and etched window graphics that follow the theme.

“The commercial stuff spins off in all sorts of directions,” Poynter notes.

Poynter’s book illustrations began with a Natural History series of colouring books issued by an Australian newspaper group. Full-colour renderings of native birds, fish and animals provide an easy-learning guide to children (and adults!) as they colour the large outline drawings.

Illustrations of local wildlife and waterfowl will form part of Poynter’s work at the Iris Griffith Centre this August, where she will be Artist in Residence. Her sketches and drawings will be provided to the Centre to use for display and educational materials. Poynter will be offering interpretive nature walks, sketching, and plein air painting demonstrations each weekend in August.

She’ll also be leading a series of workshops on the lower Coast, teaching painting with watercolours at Tanglewood Studio in Gibsons, with acrylics as part of the SCRD Parks and Recreation program, and Basic Watercolour and Drawing at Capilano College. In the planning stages, Poynter is working on the details for a drop-in, unstructured art “class” that will provide a supportive environment for those needing minimal instruction to get past a hurdle or block in their own creative process. This, too, will be under the SCRD Parks and Rec umbrella. Watch their fall brochure for details!

Poynter also collaborates with Catherine Evans’ Tours of Exploration, providing an arts-and-culture component while guiding participants to places of extraordinary beauty. The upcoming tour to Peru features a stay at an eco-resort lodge in the Amazon valley, then moving into the Sacred Valley of Inca ruins, including Macchu Picchu. The tours offer clean, safe, mid-range accommodations and a chance to see, photograph and sketch some incredible architecture, landscapes, flora and fauna. Although known for her florals, Poynter says “when I’m away from home, I tend to paint landscapes and architectural studies.”

Figure work has been a secret joy, and is about to come out of the closet (and other storage spaces) as Poynter readies for the show “Body of Work” at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt, opening August 21. “I wanted to translate the beauty in the qualities of a life drawing to canvas – to maintain the energy of the sketching that often gets lost in the translation to paint.” The result is a series of bold studies of the human form, where strong, expressive strokes capture equally strong emotions in the curve of a back, the spread of a palm. “I get very frustrated when people talk about figure work – when they start talking as if the nudity is somehow erotica. For me, whenever I’m doing a life drawing, it’s like working on a still life. I’m looking at shadows and light – the hands, feet, and faces – the expressions. And observing as a painter those things we see all day.” And interpreting, as an artist, the emotions that perhaps are not so easily seen.

Poynter recalled her last solo show at the Arts Centre was a dozen years ago, and quite different from the upcoming work. Entitled “A Counter Production,” it displayed a whimsical series of still lifes crated in, and illustrating, Poynter’s warn kitchen, it was the pragmatic output of a single mom who saw the beauty and joy in her home’s heart and hearth. As with her upcoming show, she was interpreting and paying homage to the things we may see, but overlook.

This is where Jan Poynter continues to grow and excel as an artist – in bringing to our attention the things we need to see, enjoy, and celebrate.

Jan Poynter’s work is on view at the Landing Gallery, Gibsons; La Cabana Gallery, Sechelt; and online at www.flickr.com/photos/janpoynter_artist