Artist's Biography
Janet Read lives in Markham, Ontario. Her recent work grew from residencies in Newfoundland and the west coast of Ireland. The sea is a constant theme: the play of light and shadow, depth and surface.
Her colour is rich and layered, oil and alkyd resin. Read is a musician and poet. She teaches music and maintains a studio in Markham in the winter and a seasonal studio near Barrie on Kempenfelt Bay in the summer.
She just completed an MA in the philosophy of art on metaphor in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur.
Artist's statement
Ocean As Vessel
… there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun....
...Is it a luminous flittering
Or the concentration of a cloudy day?
Is there a poem that never reaches words
Wallace Stevens
One of my favourite painters had an ancestor who coined new names for clouds.
He made a taxonomy for those flickers and flares of light and dark that hang ominously or stream like banners over the landscape of our days.
Clouds are the roof of our world. Dismal or fair, grey or white, looming or bright cirrus streams through blue space. Light and cloud are the visible weather of the heart.
I spent a month in Newfoundland, more precisely, on the Northern Peninsula with a short journey to Battle Harbour in Labrador. What place has so much air, sky, sea, and land? The sculptured contour of it all…..
The painter is drowned in light, drowned in dark, shadowed by grey fugitive light and the deep flaring red of the sea as last dregs of day drain into fallen evening.
Colour is the language of water and the lyric diction of the sky.
Deep blues, tarnished greens, sullen greys; reds like roses cast in memory down the Ganges; orange as bright lanterns setting sail for the Sea of Japan.
White is foam on the water, hard edge of pounding waves, thin dawn line against dark mornings. White is empty. White is full. It is transparent; something to put your hand into, and something to haul you through.
Shapes bleed through white, bleed through mist, break through and vanish. We find them in our cupboards, rattling in our attics, knock against them in our nights.
Fugitive light is the nature of sea and sky. They are lost in each other; reflect and bound each other at the fleeing horizon.
The horizon moves: sometimes close and sometimes far as the far side of the rounding world.
Horizon is longing, heartbreak...the hard and the easy. It is our question and what we ask for; logos, place.
ocean is vessel,
light spills dark wind, and keening wave,
Whitman’s rusty old nurse, brings
forests from water, bread from stone |
