Tales from an Artist's Journal

I never went to art school, apart from a futile course one year, that promised much but delivered little…I majored in English Literature at University, and had planned to teach..

I married straight after graduation and after three years at home went to work for the Federal Govt…ten years later I had my son and my life changed forever….I never went back to work…

I started to paint when he was six….I was not painting pictures then…that came several years later..it was the height of the faux finishing furor…Paint Magic was the bible and I taught myself to do wood graining, marbling, every type of restoration work, as well as decorative painting…

When the British master decorative painter Nella Opperman, came to Canada, I signed up for her courses, though at a thousand dollars per week, they were horrifically expensive for something that was still virtually unknown here…...I found that I had taught myself well, but learned a number of additional techniques from her…..[in the end it was worth the expense, as I carried those very same skills over into my fine art painting].

Soon after that, I became quite well known, and was asked to do features for magazines and television, doing walls, floors, fabric and furniture, for the media as well as in private homes…then it began to feel too much like work, and I scaled it back to doing features for just one magazine, Canada’s popular House and Home magazine..

I decided it was time to develop other painting skills, so I purchased a set of watercolours and got to work…I had been doing my decorative painting in oils, so watercolour was a challenging medium to try, but an exciting one as well….

I read everything I could get my hands on about the medium and spent a great deal of time at the library, poring over old books with black and white images, swallowing whole every bit of advice these old instruction books gave the unwitting beginner…I did indeed feel that I was a beginner…for me working in oils was easy stuff…I still feel that way.

I soon found out that though I learned a lot, that some of the advice was irksome, like keeping a sketch book and painting outdoors….since I painted only in winter, and this is Canada, the latter was certainly not an option…

I did keep many journals though, jotting down ideas for paintings and even did some quick sketches, which I never did use…..several years ago I got very ambitious and did a very large pictorial journal of ideas, and it is this journal that I want to share with you….it contains many of the techniques you have seen in my paintings here, so for those who have asked me “how did you do that?” I will try to provide some answers…

This won’t be a series of How To Paint articles, but rather I will share how I arrived at certain ideas and how I achieved them…I will be using images from the journal, so if you see something on my page which disappears in an instant, look for the image here…Janis

Please let me know if you would like me to continue this series, by commenting below….

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acrylic, art, cards, inks, janis, media, mixed, oils, painting, pastels and watercolour