b'preparation for the Museum of the City of New York exhibition. She explained that the individual owers were themselves so exquisite that she felt obliged to show them close-up in her painting, despite how the circle of blossoming pear trees at the very center of her monumental composition is located much too far away for anyone to see the individual little owers. She even provided her dark river god gure with a branch of the blossoms to offer irtatiously to his naiad partner. Of course, the juxtaposition of these very different and separate painted images of the blossoming trees, for double observation, if I may put it that way, is similar in concept to the superimposition of video images on painted images. Thanks to such artistic license and wishful thinking, close-up and faraway always co-exist in Janets art, just as gures observed rst-hand co-exist in her minds eye with gures familiar from museum art. As an artist she refuses to overlook anything that comes to mind while at work. She wants to include it all; anything and everything. But even so, each detail comes in for careful consideration, often many times over. Preoccupied by Janets virtuosity as a painter, I made scarcely any reference in my Gatherings essay to the video images she already projected on a few of her paintings. For the sake of museum decorum, she had opted not to show her earliest painting with a video projection entitled Love in the Park, the sexual theme of which has nevertheless been an ongoing feature of her most complex Central Park works ever since. In the end, the MCNY exhibition included only three works with electrical components. In order to convey the glow of sunlight drenching the Sheep Meadow lawn she devised a backing board with strips of LED lights to attach behind her monumental oil entitled Lemonade. At the time, it never occurred to me how this hidden rear illumination could be understood as another one of Janets unconventional collage elements. The aforementioned projection of her splashing-birds video onto the puddle in General Sherman was hard to see as it was installed. But her other video painting stole the show. Visitors to the exhibition were always clustered in front of Tango, Janets nocturnal painting of dancers developed as a screen for the projectionofherthree-minutelongvideoofthesamedancers,accompaniedbyamusical soundtrack. These viewers always stayed for the entirety of the projection, and many of them watched it over and over. In my long museum curatorial career, I seldom, if ever before, encountered viewers so completely spellbound. It was only after the publication of Gatherings, when Janet increasingly prioritized her multimedia ideas, that I learned how she had hoped to incorporate video into her paintings since around 2008, when she received a camera with a video function from her artist daughter, Kathy Rutten-berg. Unlike her near contemporaries involved with the intersection of graphic art and videofor example, David Hockney or William KentridgeJanet has used her video clips as unconven-tional collage elements, often presented on pocket-sized screens that she partially overpaints, quite literally merging video with traditional painting. While the new emphasis on technology in-volves an exciting extension of her practice following the MCNY exhibition, it seems import-ant to acknowledge that more traditional collage elements have played an essential role in her art since she was a girl in Iowa. The short videos that she made starting around 2008 in relationship to such underway paintings as General Sherman and Tango now belong to a sizable library of moving images for possible use in conjunction with her paintings. But it was not until 2011 that Janet managed to integrate some of these videos with her paintings to her satisfaction. Thats when she met the young video editor Andrew Siwoff, who, ever since, has guided the realization of her multimedia ideas. Siwoff soon enlisted the help of his brother, video artist Kevin Siwoff; and in addition to editing Janets videos, under her supervision, the Siwoffs introduced her to the OPPOSITECollage composed from parts of two photographs, circa 2016, inkjet on paper, 27 x 14 inches. OVERLEAFBees Dick as photographed in 2021, begun circa 2005, oil, gold leaf, mirrored-glass, cut-paper collage on canvas, with embedded LCD screens, 78 x 180 inches. Video frame composed of 126 synchro-nized LCD screens featuring Central Park faces photographed by the artist over many years. 5051'