Beginning in 1966, Jan Baltzell spent time each year in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, in a house overlooking a vast expanse of open sky and marshes surrounding the Herring River. For many years thereafter she made paintings with water imagery, including Dancing Waters 2. Commenting on the theme of nature, Baltzell remarked, "My love of nature provides me with a working structure -a storehouse of sensory memories which I am representing and abstracting at the same time."
Baltzell attended the Philadelphia College of Art (now called the University of the Arts), studying with Larry Day and the landscape painter Gretna Campbell. Baltzell's works are in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among others. She has taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts since 1985.
