Jan Franco

My Featured Work:

My Story

“Sometimes I look out the window and I see the sky’s vibrant blue set against the glowing golden amber of the setting sun and I need to take a note of it so I can find those exact colors and put them together in my next piece.”

My name is Jan Franco and I am a jeweler.

I started my jewelry business twelve years ago, but my love and passion for art began long before that. In my teenage years, I often felt bored during art classes. While I enjoyed the curriculum that introduced me to sketching and painting, I wanted something more challenging. My high school art teacher happened to be a goldsmith who created beautiful pieces for New York socialites. He saw my potential and offered to teach me smithing after school. He gave me the confidence and tools to open myself up to the creative spirit within me, and then to unleash it into the world. I began silversmithing and it stuck with me all throughout high school and eventually all the way through college. I even audited a smithing class at my college. I considered doing it as a profession but realized that as much as I loved the craft, it could not sustain me financially. Instead, I graduated from college with a degree in sociology and psychology.

Alas, art would not let me go. Ten years after I got my Bachelor's degree I went back to school to broaden my educational and professional horizons. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design and got a degree in interior design. I apprenticed under different people until I was confident enough to go out on my own. I opened my own business and worked for about twenty-five years. As life goes, I was burnt out and found myself flailing around for a bit. I had no idea what to do until a friend suggested going back to the jewelry business.

I was unsure of my abilities in this new venture. But then everything changed with a catalog picture. My friend and I were admiring a stunningly gorgeous necklace and lamenting its absurdly high price. She turned to me and said, “Jan, you are smart enough to know how to do that.” As it turns out, I am. This conversation inspired me to start working on recreating the catalog necklace. Sometime later, I saw this same friend again and she looked at the necklace I was wearing—which was similar to the piece we saw in the catalog—and she could not believe I had spent that insane amount of money on a necklace. But I had not, I had gone and done what she suggested. I had studied the catalog piece, figured out how to make it, and then created it. She was absolutely blown away, and it was her who then gave me the seed money to start my jewelry business.

There are many factors that influence and inspire my artistic creations. One of them comes from my journeys around the world. I was lucky enough to have a close friend who traveled far and wide with her parents, and they would often take me with them. I got to spend much of my youth traveling to different countries and discovering new cultures and perspectives that I could have never imagined if I had stayed in the States my whole life. I spent a month traveling around Asia, and it was the trip of a lifetime. The serenity of Japan soothed and comforted me in a way that no other place has. There is a lot of Asian art influence in my work that comes from that journey. I was amazed at the woodblock prints and the stitching in kimonos. Now, all my jewelry has elements of the Japanese serenity that affected my internal self and my external relation to the natural world.

Another significant inspiration that goes into my work is mother nature’s color palette. I firmly believe that nature never makes a mistake when putting colors together. Sometimes I look out the window and I see the sky’s vibrant blue set against the glowing golden amber of the setting sun and I need to take a note of it so I can find those exact colors and put them together in my next piece.

That is how my crafting process usually starts. I see something that strikes me and then I have to go to my workshop and make it into a reality. My workspace, like many other artists, started at my dining room table. When the holidays started to come close I had to find an alternative. With a little ingenuity and my twenty-five years of work as an interior designer, I created a workplace that perfectly adapted to my available space and that fit all the supplies I needed. It is, quite literally, a closet with a studio built into it. I can open it when I need to work and when I do not, it can close right back up. All my materials come strung and I can have them hanging in front of me as I work. My husband built shelves into the closet for any products that cannot be hung and I have shelves on either side for my tools. Designing does not need a lot of space or bulky equipment. At the end of the day, I can close the door and walk away. After twelve years, I can say that I love creating and working on my craft. Ever since then, it has been my goal to instill confidence in other women, the way I was helped by my friends.

As women, we tend to always do everything for everyone else before meeting our needs. Women of all ages do this and at the end of the day, if we do not prioritize ourselves before helping ourselves we end up with nothing. I want to try to inspire girls and women and make them feel good about themselves. Sometimes, buying yourself a nice jewelry piece can do that. If I am selling at a booth in an art fair I always try to get women to try on the piece. If they do try it on, I make them look at themselves in the mirror so they can get a moment to themselves, a moment where it is just them and they can build their confidence and self-esteem. That is always the goal. I am a woman who empowers other women, in big or small ways, and I take pride in that. As women, we always have to work twice as hard to go half as far. I have realized in my long career that we always have to be fighting stereotypes. They try to dictate our behavior and our relationship with ourselves and that is for no one to determine but us.

Nature's Color Palette Never Disappoints!

Jan Franco