Jane Murray Lewis "Welcome... to the Land of Make Believe" Hand-Painted Silk

A vivid hand-painted silk by Jane Murray Lewis, with the artist's full signature worked into the lower hillside of the composition itself. The piece unfolds across a deep indigo and violet sky where a crescent moon, a smiling sun, and clusters of flying fish ride paired ribbons of rainbow from edge to edge. Below, a folk-art village of peaked houses, brick towers, and lollipop trees climbs over rolling green hills, with figures of children — dancing, climbing ladders, reaching upward — scattered throughout. Raised gold gutta resist lines every shape in the serti technique, and the outlines catch the light against the dye-saturated color fields in the way only silk allows.

The work is pencil-signed "Lewis" lower right and titled "Welcome... to the Land of Make Believe" in pencil along the lower margin. Presented in a natural wood frame, matted behind glass.

Jane Murray Lewis is an American artist and silk painter who developed a distinctive hand-painting practice rooted in the serti technique — a French method in which gutta resist is applied to silk in fine lines to create bordered color cells, not unlike the lead lines of stained glass. Lewis worked the medium with an exuberance that sets her apart from the more restrained decorative tradition: her compositions are densely populated, saturated to near-luminescent intensity, and filled with the visual grammar of folk and visionary art — spiraling trees, smiling celestial bodies, mosaic-tiled earth, and figures of joyful children. The vocabulary places her in dialogue with the Hundertwasser-influenced strain of visionary folk painting that gained a wide following in the American craft-art market from the 1980s onward, though Lewis's hand and palette are entirely her own. Her silk paintings were sold through galleries and art shows across the country, and her signed, titled works — particularly large framed compositions — are the form in which collectors most often encounter her.

CONDITION

Good. Minor scuffing to the natural wood frame; debris present behind the glass. No remarkable damage to the artwork itself. A few small spots of foxing noted in the lower mat margin.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Overall (framed): 17" H × 21" W × 1.5" D
• Visible image: 10.25" H × 14.25" W
• Medium: Hand-painted silk with gold gutta resist
• Signed: "Lewis" in pencil, lower right margin; "Jane Murray Lewis" signature within image
• Titled: "Welcome... to the Land of Make Believe" in pencil, lower margin
• Framing: Natural wood frame, white mat, glazed