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June 18, 2010
There is poetry in childhood
Janet Strayer’s art illuminates the subtlety of emotion.
OLGA LIVSHIN
Each of Janet Strayer’s digital paintings – her black and white musings of childhood – inspires a silent dialogue between the artist and her audience. Opinions and questions abounded during the opening reception of Strayer’s solo exhibition, Child Out of Time, which is at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery until June 27.
Although she has been painting and drawing since childhood, art wasn’t considered a profession in her family. “We had more of an intellectual focus,” she explained. In university, she minored in art history and majored in psychology. She worked as a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University most of her life, but her free time was always dedicated to painting.
Over the years, she enrolled in various studio courses, took classes at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and received a printmaking degree. She still goes to the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto every year for a couple of months for an infusion of the old European masters. However, five years ago, she came to the point where snatches of stolen time were not enough anymore; her art demanded more. Ever since, she has been a full-time artist.
“I feel the same joy in art as I felt in science: the joy of a journey, of solving a puzzle,” Strayer said. Both art and psychology reflect different facets of her personality. Both engage her creativity, interlocking and mutually enhancing each other. “In art, as in psychology, I ask questions and examine the answers. What’s happening to people? What makes them as they are, do what they do, feel what they feel? There’s always more than one perspective from which I could look.”
At the beginning of her path as an artist, Strayer worked in oils and acrylic. She still does, but her latest series represents her newest medium – digital painting.
“I worked with computers a lot for my psychology research,” she said. “About 15 years ago, I started fooling around in the artistic direction. What could be done digitally? What are the tools, the digital brushes? At first, it was just playing.” But with time, it has become more – a way of artistic exploration and self-expression. Her show at the Zack Gallery consists of 24 digital paintings created exclusively with electronic tools over the last two years.
The paintings were inspired by an old photograph of unknown children she once saw in a museum in a small European town. “The images wouldn’t go away,” she said. “They compelled me. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night. I’d never experienced anything like this before. I had to do this.”
Strayer uses different digital tools and worked in multiple layers. “It’s like the old masters’ technique. Only, when you work in oil, you can’t see all the layers, only the top one, but digitally you can. Sometimes, I’d work on a layer, and I knew that this particular image – a bird or a bubble – belongs to another painting. The images themselves communicated with me. And I talked to them.” She smiled. “I would sit at the computer and say: ‘How do I do this? Tell me how?’ Usually, they did.”
Strayer derives the most joy, she said, when working on a piece, creating her whimsical compositions, but when people buy her art, it is a sort of validation, a confirmation of her work. “It takes an audience to decide what art is really about,” she said. After “Garland” – one of the paintings included in the show – was sold last year, she submitted it for a competition in The Artist’s Magazine – her first-ever competition. The painting won first place in the digital art category of the 2010 All-Media Competition and appeared in the July issue of the magazine.
When seen together, “Garland” and the other paintings in the series guide the viewer on a voyage back to childhood. They invoke photographic memories and swirling emotional tides. Strayer wrote about the show: “Time, as referenced in these works, is both ancient and young – a place standing still in which everything happens.... Childhood is a time of high contrast and contradiction, strong feeling, wilful exploration, startling insights, tangible memories and enduring complexities.”
Such a sophisticated topic could be adequately expressed only in black and white, she said. “Without added color, the ‘bare bones’ of the image carry it, and the viewer supplies the palette that resonates in a personal sense.” By dispensing with color, stripping it away, she has illuminated the subtlety of emotion.
It’s no wonder that each piece in the show has a poem associated with it. Verses by Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bishop, Maya Angelou and other writers penetrate the veils of light and shadow, transforming Strayer’s monochromatic imagery into nostalgic song, frozen between dream and fact. The poetic rhythm pulses among the multiple shades of grey that constitute the pictures, propelling the shapes and forms of the artist’s imagination into the realm of magic realism.
A short poem by Emily Dickinson for the painting “Emergent” can serve as an epigraph, not only for the current show but perhaps for the entire concept of childhood: “Wonder is not precisely knowing; and not precisely knowing not.”
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She is available for contract work. Contact her at [email protected].
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