Jane Kent (born 1952, New York) is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont. She studied at University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and the London College of Printing. This work and Pink Eye (E.373-2017) were the first works she made with Aspinwall Editions. Aspinwall Editions is a fine art print publisher, dealer, and print studio with facilities in New York City and Rheine, Germany.

Using the silhouettes of unfolded cardboard packaging as her starting point, Kent builds compositions of layered and juxtaposed shapes and colours. In Blue Nose, the scallop-edged horizontal white shape is an approximation of the serrated metal strip used for tearing off a length of cooking foil or cling film from a roll. She first used these shapes in Skating (2011), a livre d’artiste with a short story by Richard Ford, and she has continued to use them as what she calls “bland forms” - simple building blocks for new images. By using flattened forms derived from formerly three-dimensional objects, her prints highlight the interplay between three dimensions and two, and between construction and deconstruction. This effect is further enhanced by her use of inks of varying opacity, and by layering areas of translucent colour.

The area of painterly wash in Blue Nose was created by painting ink wash onto Mylar to create a photographic positive, which was then exposed three times with different timings to accommodate the different densities in the wash. Thus there are three types of painterly mark on the screen, which was printed three times with different values of the blue – effectively reconstructing the original mark hand-made mark in print. The layering and overlapping of shapes, each from a close tonal range, plays visual tricks on the viewer, distorting perceptions of positive and negative space.