Jana Winthers Zide, 79, died Feb. 13, at the Hospice of the Fisher House, in Amherst.

The eldest of three daughters, Jana was born Jan. 7, 1945 and grew up in Morristown, N.J. Her father, Thomas Robert Winthers, was in marketing at the Bowery Savings Bank in New York. Her mother, Jane Lincoln Cobbett Winthers, was assistant vice president of the Fannie E. Rippel Foundation, which awards grants for medical research.

After graduating in 1967 with a BFA from the Pratt Institute of Art, Jana had adventures in France, Greece, along the Dalmatian coast, and elsewhere in Europe. She then earned her Ed.M. in counseling psychology from Temple University, in Philadelphia.

In the late 1970s, she moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where she worked as a school counselor and met and married her husband, Michael Zide.

In 1981, she received an artist-in-residence grant from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities to teach painting in the West Tisbury School. She also served as a council juror for the awarding of artists’ grants.

She moved in 1982 to Pelham, then to nearby South Amherst, where, in 1995, she and Michael built an elegant white clapboard house in what had been an orchard. It is typical of Jana that she insisted construction be done without disturbing the apple trees.

In the 1980s, she was director of the Children’s Museum at Holyoke Workshop, and later, a graduate student in the UMass Landscape Architecture program. Her winning design for the Helen Curtis Cole Commemorative Garden was dedicated in 1993. It is located between Goodell Hall and the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst.

Her life’s work was her art. Her story Theodore’s Uncommon Appetite was published in the Green Tiger Caravan, a compendium of stories from Green Tiger Press. For Paulist Press, she illustrated two books, God’s Little House (1985), and The Rules and Mysteries of Brother Lawrence (1987).

A wooden egg she decorated was included in the Easter at the White House 1986 exhibition. It is now part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

In the mid-2000s, her drawings were published in New England Watershed Magazine.

Jana was a gifted artist, a talented gardener, a discerning reader, a witty, generous and loyal friend, and a loving wife and mother. She had unerring taste. Her home reflected her refined aesthetic, its light, bright feel perhaps rooted in her Scandinavian ancestry.

She knew how to throw a party, complete with a musician playing the Steinway grand in her home.

When her toddler son was upset, she would soothe him by enveloping him tenderly in her arms, and when he was a teenager, she faithfully attended his crew meets all over New England.

She would drop what she was doing to bring a sandwich to and hold the hand of a friend struggling with new motherhood. She started a group for children’s book writers to meet and discuss their work and frequently set aside her own creative efforts to help someone else with theirs.

Jana is survived by her son, Noah Zide, her sister, Carol W. Barbour of Odenton, Md, nieces and nephews and her many friends, who cherished her.

Husband Michael died Feb. 14. Her sister, Pamela Ann Winthers, predeceased her.

The family extends a special thanks to the Fisher House staff and volunteers for their invaluable and compassionate assistance.

A memorial service for Jana and her husband, Michael Zide, will be held May 16, at 11 a.m., at Grace Episcopal Church, in Amherst, to be followed by a reception.