Paintings and Poetry

CHILD OUT OF TIME, the slideshow I last posted, is from a collection of 24 images I made for a solo art show with the same title. The show emanated from my concept of childhood as enduring beyond time and place: as memory, reverie, yearning, and hope. Its monochromatic scale evokes a sense of timelessness while emphasizing the subtleties and strengths of tone, dramatizing the distinctiveness of each image. One of its pieces was submitted to an international art competition and won a First Place in The Artist's Magazine all-media competition (June, 2010 publication. A good site for those interested in visual art and that hosts this magazine is click here.

Process: In these digital paintings, I paint on an electronic tablet with pressure- sensitized 'brushes' responsive to my hand. A computer and two monitors let me see the effects as I draw and paint on different layers of my emerging composition. Pixels, rather than paint, are deposited and pushed or pulled into place at different layers of the work, from microscopic to surface.The techniques I use are similar to techniques I use in traditional painting: sketching the compositional elements, modeling the big forms, refining the details. Many of the works rely entirely on this kind of painting "from scratch". I also include collage in some compositions, introducing personally altered elements from my other paintings and photos. (for more, see the Digital Gallery at www.janetstrayerart.com)

There is a personal story to these paintings: their initiation by an old photograph I happened to see a tiny, one-room museum in a small European town, and the extent to which images relating to what finally became these paintings took hold of me over the course of two years. You can read about this in a well-written press article (below). What I want relate now is the wonderful experience of seeing them all together in a beautiful, white-walled gallery space, looking out at the viewers.

Opening night was a blast. But even more terrific was an event that followed. It was a poetry-festival in which poets read the poems they had drafted based in some way upon these paintings. Sitting in the audience, unknown to nearly all  of the poet-readers, I was seeing the works as if for the first time, through their creative visions. It was thrilling! Not only because I had been intimately involved with these paintings, but because I felt, in my bones and being, the largeness of what creative acts can do: that any one form of art can create multitudes of creative experiences.

Today's Thought:  
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, 
and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. 
~Leonardo da Vinci

Before this poetry event took place, I was interviewed for the press by Olga Livshin, an interesting writer and journalist whom I had never met, nor had I previously had the pleasure of reading her work. Olga proved to be prescient in entitling her article about my show, headlined: There is Poetry in Childhood: Janet Strayer’s art illuminates the subtlety of emotion. I've been interviewed before on various topics, including my art. But I must say that the insightful questions asked and the understanding conveyed by Olga were rare and much appreciated. Her newspaper article begins, "Janet Strayer's art illuminates the subtlety of emotion. ..." The full article can be viewed by clicking here.

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