Artist Profile

Janey Fritsche

San Rafael, CA

STATEMENT

My work for the last six or eight years has focused on the ocean with a view for encouraging ocean conservation. Those series started as a result of living in Hawaii for six months where I experienced the joy of spending a lot of time in that beautiful water and the sorrow of seeing the damage to the coral reefs, and other sea life.

It has been a time of reckoning, and a time for regrouping. It fueled my personal need to seek refuge from the traumas we are all suffering with the pandemic, the wild fires, the social injustice, and the nightmare of our national government. Where do we turn for peace?

I go back to the seashore as I have most of my life as a place where I can find solace and experience blessed nature. That coupled with my ongoing meditation practice and recent portrait paintings led me to integrate figurative work into a series related to life on the water. With this work, I’m focusing on the joy inherit when people let their day-to-day cares slip aside as they gather at the seashore. I believe that there is something magical about where the land meets the sea; it is like the melding of the conscious and subconscious world. It is a place where we can do a “reset” for a fresh view of life, a place we can just be at peace, a place to awaken joy.

Perhaps art is about presenting different mental maps that can help shape the subconscious, and hence, our future. Life becomes what we think. My hope is that these paintings invite viewers to be more present in the moment and in nature, and encourage a better vision for moving forward and honoring all life on the planet.

BIO

Janey was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, where she spent considerable time with her mom’s extended family on the beaches of the Gulf coast - a source of inspiration to this day.

Upon graduation from high school, Janey was offered an art scholarship. Given her fear of being a starving artist, she turned to earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics with minors in Art and Sociology from Lamar University. She combined these seemingly disparate subjects into a career of interactive design work for clients like Apple, George Lucas Educational Foundation, Stanford University, Paramount Pictures, the Smithsonian, and the Grateful Dead. At the same time, Janey’s art education continued at San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, and College of Marin.

Her painting practice is woven together with her long-standing meditation practice and her abiding love of the ocean. Her memories carry a utopian vision that she explores in her search for “how can I use art as a force for good”? While living on Oahu for six months a few years back, Janey realized first hand the devastation to the coral reefs and other sea life. This inspired her to focus her artwork on the natural world related to the seas.

Janey’s paintings are collected nationally and internationally. In recent years, she completed an Artist in Residency at Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, India, and had solo exhibitions of her work at the Maturango Museum in southern California, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Art Works Downtown. Her commission work includes paintings for Kaiser Permanente Technology Center, Kaiser Permanente Chemical Dependency Treatment Center, Sutter Cathedral Hills Hospital, and the Lodge at Bodega Bay..

Janey's studio is in San Rafael, California.