Jan’s public lectures have been likened to “verbal jazz riffs,” and his drawings show the same delightful spontaneity. He used a method that is now called “contour” or “continuous line” drawing, where an artist relies on instinct, rarely lifting the pen from the page and never stopping its movement, once pen has touched paper, until the drawing is complete.
This method is in the surrealist tradition, which held that the immediate artful experience is more important than the laborious processes of painting, drawing and sculpting. Thus, spontaneous drawing became a popular means of expression among surrealist artists in the early twentieth century.
True to the tradition, Jan’s art often seems to effortlessly capture a complex mood and moment—in movement. See a collection of some of his work in our online Gallery– jancox.org)
