Artist Profile

Janey Fritsche

San Rafael, CA

STATEMENT

My work has focused on the ocean in recent years, driven by a desire to encourage conservation and deepen our connection to the natural world. These series began after living in Hawaii for six months, where I experienced both the profound joy of immersing myself in the ocean’s beauty and the sorrow of witnessing the damage to coral reefs and marine life—fragile ecosystems that often go unseen or overlooked beneath the water’s surface.

Recent years have been a time of reckoning and regrouping, fueling my need to seek refuge from the traumas we all face—pandemic, global warming, social injustice, political turmoil. Where do we turn for peace? I return to the seashore, a threshold between worlds, where the tangible meets the ephemeral, and where we can witness the ever-changing dance of wind, tide, and light. The ocean’s rhythms, both seen and unseen, reflect the fleeting nature of our own experiences, offering a space for renewal and introspection.

This, along with my ongoing meditation practice and exploration of portraiture, has led me to integrate figurative work into a series centered on life at the water’s edge. Here, I focus on the quiet joy that emerges when people surrender to the present moment—allowing their daily concerns to dissolve like footprints in the sand. The seashore is a place of reset, where we can rediscover a sense of belonging within nature, if only for a passing moment.

Perhaps art offers alternative ways of mapping reality—revealing the invisible, shaping the subconscious, and influencing our future. My hope is that these paintings invite viewers to attune themselves to the unnoticed, impermanent, and wondrous aspects of nature, cultivating a deeper presence in the world and a renewed commitment to honoring all life on this planet.

BIO

Janey was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, where childhood days spent on the Gulf Coast with her mother’s extended family continue to inspire her work.

Offered an art scholarship after high school, she instead pursued a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at Lamar University, with minors in Art and Sociology, driven by a fear of the “starving artist” path. She later blended these disciplines into a dynamic career in interactive design, collaborating with clients such as Apple, the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Stanford University, Paramount Pictures, the Smithsonian, and the Grateful Dead. At the same time, she deepened her art education at the San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, and College of Marin.

Janey’s award winning paintings are collected nationally and internationally. She has been an Artist in Residence at Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, India, and has held solo exhibitions at the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, California, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, California. Her commissioned work includes paintings for Kaiser Permanente Technology Center, Kaiser Permanente Chemical Dependency Treatment Center, Sutter Cathedral Hills Hospital, and Bodega Bay Lodge.

She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works out of her studio in San Rafael, California.