b'LOVE IN THE PARK CHARLES STUCKEY I was in for lots of surprises when I met Janet in 2012, introduced by our late mutual friend, Sir John Richardson, the Picasso biographer. Right away it was clear to me that Janets works were no less accomplished and compelling than those by her generations most acclaimed artists, and yet she remained altogether unknown to me after my decades spent as a museum curator. Why would such a serious artist care so little for art world visibility? Aside from a few half-hearted efforts to nd a dealer in the 1970s and 1980s, when sexism continued to be a major art market barrier, Janet has always made her art for herself rather than with any target audience in mind. Her anti-careerist attitude could be compared with that of the legendary New York painter, Florine Stettheimer, during the rst half of the 20th century. With recognition coming to her in her eighties, Janet conforms to the increasingly familiar stereotype of a late-career female artist appreciated at long last. It goes almost without saying that evolving this way as a serious artist has had an important impact on Janets practice. Since her works never leave her studio, she can and does return to them repeatedly, scraping sections out, sometimes elaborating, sometimes simplifying. She has no need to add her signature as a nal touch. Unlike most marketed art, with some notable exceptions (I am thinking of 1950s paintings by Willem de Kooning), Janets works evolve in layers upon layers of new insights that sometimes resemble archaeological strata. To me she is a modern day Protogenes, the fourth century, BCE Greek painter acclaimed for his inability to nish; or a real-life version of Honor de Balzacs famous ctional painter Frenhofer, likewise endlessly seeking the fulllment of his vision. Yet the exceptional richness of Janets art, both graphically and conceptually, has a lot to do with the superimposition and integration over years of diverse visual ideas, revisions, and additions, one alongside or overlapping the other, this and that, now and then. Culminating decades of work as a master printmaker and as a portraitist devoted almost exclusively to family and friends, Janets monumental Central Park paintings have been her single-minded preoccupation throughout the 21st century. The Central Park paintings are a surprising departure from the ensembles of monumental etchings on stainless steel panels that she created over the course of nearly two decades beginning in the late 1960s. Each depicts cars in prole, the drivers and any passengers partially visible through the windows, with the passing shadows and reections of trees and Park Avenue skyscrapers uidly registered on the lustrous sculpted automobile surfaces. For her still-larger paintings of Central Park, the role of the car lled with strangers is taken by the Sheep Meadow lled with sunbathers, and the role of the shadows and reections superimposed on windshields and fenders is taken by the videos and colored light that she sometimes projects on her paintings as images in motion. Considering the technical challenges to be overcome as she intermixes video with her Central Park paintings, it should be mentioned that her Park Avenue etchings were executed on sheets of automotive stainless steel manufactured to be acid resistant. Overcoming material challenges has been a constant at the heart of Janets art practice for decades. She works eagerly and tirelessly every day, weather permitting, outdoors, always at the same spot on the north side of Central Parks Sheep Meadow. When I began to drop by, hoping to watch her in action, I was amazed by the enormous scale of her watercolors, far exceeding any others familiar to me. She unrolls two or three 15-foot-long paper strips, and anchors them next OPPOSITEEntrance to Sheep Meadow, 1999-2009, oil on wrapping polyethylene lm, inkjet, cut-paper collage on canvas, 85 x 57 inches. 37'