New Moon Rising Artist Statement
These paintings explore notions of memory and inheritance as well as intention and “choosing again”. They reflect thinking about unity and worlds mixing harmoniously – of new ways of being.
-Janet
New Moon Rising, Solo Exhibition, *new* gallery, TO, 2010 - Artist Statement
I associate moons with women …. with fertility and creation stories and also with in-between times of flux. I think of tides and nightlight …. of ritual and celebration.
I’m fascinated with things in the process of becoming or coming undone.
These paintings explore notions of memory and inheritance as well as intention and “choosing again”. They reflect thinking about unity and worlds mixing harmoniously – of new ways of being.
-Janet
About the Exhibition
New Moon Rising was my first solo exhibition as a member of *new gallery*. There was a lot of excitement leading up to the opening night. I am grateful to my first year painting professor, Martin Pearce, for writing the foreword for the small exhibition catalogue.
Exhibition Catalogue Foreword, New Moon Rising. Martin Pearce, MA, Assistant Professor University of Guelph. 2009
“I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point. And, as the limitations are something called pigment and canvas, let’s see if I can do it.” Lee Krasner
I thought of Krasner’s “roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-on-with-it” remark when I saw Janet Stanley’s new paintings. They’re materially voluminous, richly worked with thousands of touches of pigment to canvas. They show an obsessive concern with the activity of painting and reveal a chaotic process, sometimes held in check, sometimes, deliciously losing it. She’s painting in control, (think of the patient mixing, considerations of structure) – and out of control (think of things that are slippery, unstable, wet into wet), in the same work.
This is not an ironic stance, not the microscope turned on the tropes of gesture and expressionism – it IS gesture and expressionism, pitching their tents and inviting us in for one more revival show.
What we get is that painting-unique experience of a process of making, recorded like evidence, and held up for us to see and feel; the painter’s energy, (what I think Krasner meant by “alive”), offered to us, full of excess and confusion, discipline and risk.
-Martin Pearce, MA, University of Guelph