Artist Statement

The content of my paintings goes beyond the visible features of woods, rocks, and water. I aim to capture the essence of a place—moving air, solid rock, transient water, and the strength of the ground beneath. I feel a deep affection for the natural world's otherness, a place that exists independently before I see it and continues to exist after I leave. What I depend on is the separateness of wilderness.

For me the magic of the landscape is that it is actually a parallel world to that of humankind. I am delighted when I find a place that is perfect in its wholeness, clearly a world apart, that requires nothing of me, and that offers me nothing but a vision of its self-sufficiency. I don’t want to be merely in a place that exists outside and beyond me, I want to become that place.

The act of painting unites me with a wilderness that I recognize within myself. When I am not painting, I feel disoriented, not knowing where I really am. Putting paint onto the canvas is where I find my bearings, at the intersection of the image and the brush. A glimpse of landscape becomes a structure on which to put paint, and that place becomes submerged in the process of painting. Place and paint merge in a synthesis that is something new, apart from that which I originally encountered. A painting emerges from my meeting with it, and the place itself floats back away into the wilderness.

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Profile of Janice Anthony by John O'Hern, American Art Collector, June 2012