JANET READ - OSA
Read is a painter with an unusual mastery of colour relationships whose non-figurative canvases express a profound, complex, and yet natural connection between the sensible world and the world only invented through contemplative exercise. Her work is also informed by a mature philosophical understanding and an acute social conscience, but not in any overt polemical way; she prefers the meaning of her experience and thought to rise naturally from an intuitive base in colour and form rather than from explicit image or symbol.
Janet Read’s painting is a voyage without territorial illusions into a huge world enclosing a vast solitude. Her journey is active with invention, motivated by metaphor, impelled by imagination, and centred in meditation. To borrow a phrase, she is “contemplativa in actione,” a paradoxical consequence of the sort of painting she practices. In her work, she navigates the world, but is not held to it.
|