Jan taught for 37 years, wrote six books, was dean of the first new law school founded in Georgia in 80 years, and even ran for Governor, just to tweak the powers-that-be. His descriptive analyses of human behavior and maps of consciousness contribute to the current understanding of the mind and its influences.

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, never 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 predominant means of expression and innovation among surrealist artists in the early twentieth century. Surrealism produced a rich array of graphic techniques, including “automatic drawing.”

True to the tradition, Jan’s art often seems to effortlessly capture a complex mood and moment—in movement.