Janet's art tells stories. Here's hers.
Janet’s artwork is influenced by her lifelong career as a storyteller. She began drawing and painting in 2016, after more than 30 years as a news reporter and editor. While she enjoys many artistic pursuits — from pet portraits to landscapes – she has found her groove in translating figure modeling sessions into imaginative visual stories. These pieces most often start with live modeling sessions run by The Bunker Creative, a small art collective that meets to draw twice a week in Janet’s hometown of Maplewood, N.J. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bunker’s figure sessions moved with most of the rest of the world to Zoom. Confining at first, the Zoom sessions ultimately transported Janet into moods, scenes and stories that transcended – or encapsulated — the limits of our pandemic lives. Janet enjoys exploring gesture, color and shape in evocative pieces that call the viewer into a scene. She welcomes you to view her gallery and to see where these pieces take you.
She also encourages everyone – of any age — to try art. Janet credits her newfound second life as an artist to a 2016 reunion with another journalist who turned to painting — Leah Kohlenberg. Janet and Leah had worked together at a newspaper in the 1990s. Leah eventually left journalism to become an artist, and when she reconnected with Janet decades later, talk turned to visual storytelling. Because a discouraging middle-school art teacher had convinced Janet she couldn’t draw, she despaired of her lack of talent. Leah insisted that drawing is a skill everyone can learn and persuaded Janet to try some of her online art classes. Next came several years of intense study and practice, much of it focused on learning to draw the human figure. Janet studied with Leah in private lessons and with Simon Levenson and other instructors at the Art Students League of New York.
Journalism remains Janet’s primary profession, though she dreams of becoming a full-time artist one day.
