Janetlee Sellers, submitted artwork
Janetlee Sellers
Painting, Sculpture, Installation
Monument, Colorado
Colorado-based Janet Sellers paints luminous fields of color populated with subjects representing action or repose. Often the imagery has subjects that appear to be swimming, flying, or floating, and they are plants, animals or landforms as well as people. Sellers paints with a formal inventiveness and a shifting sense of figure and ground, giving narrative weight to her subjects that may appear as stand-ins for heroes or lovers, families or couples, or isolated individuals. Her chromatic scenes, painted in transparent layers of acrylic, transmit a light-filled quality and offer metaphorical possibilities for issues such as gender and universal humanity. Sellers is represented by Bella Gallery in Colorado and has had group and solo shows for her paintings, sculpture and Ikebana in Japan,Seoul and Pusan, Korea, Los Angeles (LACMA, the Los Angeles mural movement, Folk Tree Gallery and The Art Store, Pasadena, CA, Colorado (Loveland, Longmont, Lone Tree, Highlands Ranch, Monument, Colorado Springs, Pueblo) . Sellers often makes use of pentimenti, where you can see that the artist has painted layers of paint over an earlier painting. This includes working over pencil drawings as well as paint as well as using over a hundred layers of glazes of color and opaque paint laid down on the surfaces. Integral in Sellers work is showing the surface of the substrate, whether it is rough canvas, watercolor paper, wood or reclaimed wood, and concrete.
Works
Janetlee Sellers, submitted artwork
I make images of contemporary life, my imagination and from my photographs, particularly manipulated photographs that I make and then create a painting from. The intimacy of painting, of bringing the image into my mind and heart and then putting it out from a vulnerable place, is empowering to contribute into the world. I can share my ideas when they come out through my physical action of painting or sculpting. I then have a rapport with the viewer, with ideas for both of us. I paint in acrylic, also in watercolor, because I like putting the paint onto the panel or on the paper. I like swishing the brush in water and watching the color dissolve into the water as I clean a brush. With paintings and prints, I manipulate them, and with the life force of my hands and my heart, generate the art image. I make hand-made books with my imagery and some included my original haiku poems (in English) on the pages. A book may be the most intimate and personal artwork, because we can hold it in our hands. With the living Spirit trees (Native American) imagery that I respectfully portray, the trees’ energy and power reach people from their beginnings through hundreds of years up to today’s people, for human hearts of all ages, and my photographs are key to immediate rapport with them. I am involved with Elders of several Indigenous Nations in protecting the awareness and locations of sacred sites, sharing them through my art and nature walks.
