Janet Myers was born in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. As a family growing up, they lived in Montreal, Toronto, and Burlington. Her most recent job was teaching high school art and photography in Toronto. Her medium is acrylic paint, and mixed media. She has always loved making art, and is fortunate enough to have drawings her mom saved that she did as a child.  

Janet has a diverse art background. To list them:  art conservation course at college, film and plate making in graphics, mechanical and electronic drafting with a pencil and pen, technical illustration and photography for dairy packaging machines service manuals. Later in life she went to university to obtain an honours degree so she could teach high school art. Her degree is in cultural studies with an emphasis in visual arts.  She was confident in her arts skills to achieve her goal, and became a high school teacher of visual arts, printmaking, and photography. 

Currently she is retired because of a rare brain disease called Central Nervous System Vasculitis. This challenge informs her work today. She is fortunate in that this condition has affected the left side of her brain leaving her talent and creativity intact. 

Having been busy with promoting her student’s work in the past, she now feels it is her time. She has shown when she was younger. Now she looks forward to showing again and selling her work. Currently, she is working on a new abstract pattern series in acrylic called Pattern Works. Pattern has always interested her. Her goal is to make larger paintings with this meditative style. Currently her main focus is her abstract painting. She is really excited about her Pattern Works series. 

 

 

 

My work is inspired by my interest in design, pattern, and colour whether it is acrylic painting, mixed media, or collage, layering of images always surfaces.   

Presence is the concept for my multiple layers of imagery. The imagined past meets the present to create a new presence in totality. Visual past has a spiritual aura, or residue that constitutes the depth in presence. An unspoken history, per say, that informs the present giving it enhanced meaning through memories or historical associations. What once was is now still but, with added value. This value indemnifies with time. 

My Pattern Works series manifests the relationship between meditative intuitive pattern and isolation/quarantine. It does this in the process of creating it. These works start with painted motifs randomly placed on the base layer to establish an imagined memory/history, and colour scheme.  As the patterned layers build the colours gradate. What gets left exposed from each coat is random which solidify into determined choices. The work creates a tension between restriction and freedom. How one negotiates this space comes into question.  

The freedom to make choices, or not, becomes the driving force in this meditation. Health is fleeting and fragile exacerbated by immune compromised issues. Everyday decisions, either intuitive or logical, create a strain on perceived out comes. 

The under painting is an imagined past peeking through the pattern as an unknowable presence. This too creates a tension between the predictability of pattern to the randomness of memories that seem to break through interrupting the meditative process. 

The dominant intuitive pattern in white becomes a symbol of life moving forward. Some shapes stagnant, some dynamic but always moving strangely towards creating another relationship as they parallel each other on the page.