Janice Anthony
The content of my paintings lies beyond the visible features of woods and rocks and water. My intention is to convey the sense of a place; the moving, the solidity of rock and the transience of water and the strength of the ground beneath. I feel a great affection for the otherness of the natural world, for a place which I have just entered which exited autonomously before I saw and felt it and which continues to exist when I leave. What I depend on is the separateness of wilderness.
For me the magic of 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, no knowing where I really am. Putting paint onto canvas is where I find my bearings, at the intersection of the image and the brush. A glimpse of landscape becomes a structure of which to put paint, and that place becomes submerged in the process of painting. Place and paint merge in 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 from the wilderness.
Artwork
