Jane Filer is uninhibited as she talks of primal expressions and intuitive feelings that give birth to brilliantly colored paintings and abstracted images, all of which tell stories; her stories.

“I find it as I go,” says Flier of the stories in her work.

Filer is a nationally known, North Carolina artist showing at Arts of the Albemarle’s Jenkins Gallery beginning today. Her show will open with an artist’s reception today at 5:30 p.m. She will be on hand to discuss her work, and hold workshops over the weekend. She will also be the featured artist at the Designer House Sunday, 2 p.m.

Filer’s work is a form of expressionism that some have found reminiscent of Marc Chagall. And while Filer isn’t shy about talking Chagall, she is her own artist, moved by her own muses.

Filer lives in the woods near Chapel Hill with her husband. When she’s not in the woods, she is living and painting on Oak Island. Either place informs her work; nature and the creatures she meets are her inspirations, her muses.

Her canvases seem to be typically large swaths of color that are fused together by a multitude of brush or pallet knife strokes that incorporate textures and line that she says are an integral part of her creations’ expressive concepts. Her creations are largely representative of pastoral images, or perhaps seascapes.

Her process, she explains, begins with the large, abstracted swaths of color. Her acrylic paints are mixed with textural mediums and this stage of her process forms meaning for the artist.

“It’s the only way I can find to trigger a deep, subliminal, imaginative kind of story,” she says of her painterly process.

From this process the images emerge. She says while she works with sketches in notebooks from time to time, in the end the process of painting is what gives life to expressions of her environment.

“As I work, many themes start to develop,” she says.

And if the work is going in the right direction, she feels it and the development of a painting unfolds in a natural way, uninhibited by preconceived notions of what the piece should be, or express.

“I want to get excited; visually and textually stimulated,” she says of her work as a painter.

To Filer, her process possesses a certain mystery and ambiguity. However, to one viewing the end result, the work possesses less ambiguity while stimulating the imagination; a seascape is easily recognized and a pastoral scene is not lost in deeply abstracted images. Rather, Filer’s work possesses a balance between the abstract and concrete worlds that allows the viewer access, while not hindering imagination or perhaps individual interpretation of the work. So the images Filer paints will likely not cultivate the same meaning for each individual.

“The viewer comes up and plugs in their own reasoning to it,” says Filer.

Filer has been painting for 30 years. Her work is known throughout the state and the country. Her current commission project is the creation of a large panel piece for the Raleigh/Durham Airport.

Filer’s show opens today, but she will also hold workshops over the weekend. And she’s no stranger to teaching art.

Filer worked for a number of years at the well-known Carrboro Art Center teaching painting. These days she paints full time with the occasional workshop on her calendar.

Through her workshops, Filer assists painters in discovering there “own inner guide.”

“I don’t want to teach my work as a technique,” she says.

Rather, she works with color theory and teaching fellow painters “about accessing imagination.”

Filer’s work will be on display at Arts of the Albemarle’s Center through Nov. 13. For more information call 252-338-6455.