b'While she sometimes shoos me away rather than lose her concentration, just as often, she offersNew York Citys inspiring diversity. Unaware that a seeming landscape painter has them under sibylline commentslike how, by painting the same scene repeatedly for nearly 20 years, shesurveillance, the people who gather at the Sheep Meadow to relax, play, and sometimes show off nally realizes the geometric laws that condition space. As she watches the Park wide-eyed, shein public are to her mind the equivalent of posed models. Insatiable when it comes to her art, might ask if I am familiar with some particular poem. Always with more on her mind than I canwhenever possible Janet still attends the Art Students League, open evening life-drawing sessions imagine, as if conducting a full orchestra with her extended brushes, correcting herself, delighted,to practice capturing quick poses. During daylight hours when she confronts the vast Sheep Janet embraces the park like a 21st-century Georges Seurat, of Sunday in the Park with GeorgeMeadow landscape as a painter, she simultaneously and constantly makes little notebook sketches fame. Whenever I visited her at work in her studio, she is listening to opera broadcast at full blast.of nearby and faraway gures on the lawn, strangers to her; and for future reference she also takes snapshots and quick videos of squirrels and birds, unleashed children, picnickers, amateur Although landscape has been all-but-taboo in mainstream contemporary art throughout hermusicians, lovers, tourists, and more than a few oddballs. She stashes these various sketches lifetime, for me Janets majestic paintings rival the best landscape paintings ever made anywhere.away in her studio like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter, eventually incorporating them into She responds that she is not painting landscapes, but rather group portraits. She recentlyher paintings, one way or anotherelaborating them, juxtaposing them, humanizing her grand mentioned how she saw herself in an Edward Steed cartoon published in the New Yorker showinglandscape compositions. The discrepancy in scale between her gure studies in various media an artist in an alley poised to ambush an unsuspecting blank canvas walking down the sidewalk.and her grand compositions calls to mind for me the scores of portable wooden panels on which She certainly has a shermans patience as she awaits her artistic prey, day after day. JanetsSeurat recorded the various gures and groups to be included at full scale in his other now-iconic fascination with the people gathered on the Sheep Meadow lawn like pagans in some Golden Agepark painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. But although Seurat never is the essential motivation for her ongoing Central Park series. Teeming with semi-naked guresexhibited these miniature masterpieces alongside his nished composition, Janet quite literally of varying races, genders and ages, all of her Central Park works are celebrations of 21st-centuryattaches some of her sketches to her paintings. Treated this way as collage, they provide evidence of her own process of making a work of art as an essential part of the fully resolved image. More ABOVE A full-size inkjet print of Study #9 as displayed in Janets rst video frame at the Dubuque Museum of Art in 2014-2015. This frame was subsequently revised.ABOVECentral Park Collage (#9), 2016, inkjet, cut-paper collage, 60 x 95 inches. 4243'