b'episodes already familiar from the Study #9 frame, these elaborate video montages provide glimpses of park activities as meditations on lifes basic stagesfrom childhood play to sexual consummationcelebrated, while squirrels come and go, with a wedding dance, impromptu music-making and picnic feasts, an at-play world oblivious to the solitary male passerby with a sack slung over his shoulder. Merging the montage-in-progress and the painting-in-progress quite literally, in 2019 Janet painted the torsos and legs of two gures along the bottom edge of her canvas to match up with adjacent screens programmed to play videos with the heads and hands of these same gures. In the videos they happen to be consulting their cell phones to view images of the very landscape around them: Janets Sheep Meadow, with shady leaves overhead and the skyline in the background. Visually combining the foreground with the background, the same overhanging leaves and distant buildings in silhouette are visible as reections on the rim of the round plate that is likewise featured in the video montage along the bottom of this frame. Previously incorporated into both the Study #9 frame and the Magnet Collage, the circular plates role as abstract shape became grandly manifest in the paintings evolving composition. The so-called picture plane of E=mc 2, the immediate foreground layer of the image, was structured at one stage with enormous radiating imaginary concentric circles, the perimeters visible here and there as fragments of overhanging branches and their shadows arranged like exploding graphic waves, the outermost arc fragments just touching the centers of the top and bottom edges of the canvas. In its vigor, the brushwork suggests to me that these imaginary circles were perceived all of a sudden, like bits of an overpowering revelation. Of course, the paintings title refers to Albert Einsteins famous equation based on his theory of relativity. For all her personal modesty, Janet thinks big as an artist, most evidently in the size of her works, their widely diverse materiality and her emphasis on pictorial energy. In 2019, she enlivened the hand-painted lawn in E=mc 2with quickly asserted white brushstrokes, sometimes doubled or tripled, such visual energy packets corresponding to sunlit picnic blankets. A year later she reinforced these white markers with roughly a dozen collage elements: images of a diverse mix of picnickers excerpted from various Sheep Meadow photographs. No surprise, the back of the woman at the center of the group dis-plays an elaborate tattoo. At the larger scale of her painted landscape, these images, arranged as an elaborate collage, are photographic counterparts to the montage of video screens in the frame. Just above these photographic collage elements, Janet added some irregularly shaped bits of a broken mirror (that reect any movement in the spectators space). Flickering like the video images, each little scrap of mirror corresponds to an arm or torso of still other picnickers. Janet always shifts back and forth from one work-in-progress to others. While work progressed on E=mc 2, she undertook another frame in conjunction with Bees Dick, an as-yet-unexhibited painting already underway in her studio since 2005, and very much a work in progress 18 years later. Bees Dick is possibly the most reworked of all her large paintings, and Janet can no longer recall when exactly she chose its current title, slang for something very smallfor example, a near-miss in tennis. Presumably the title came to her when she added the bee and its ower, ob-served close up, as the sort of emblematic foreground detail one would expect in a 16th-century painting by Titian with a landscape setting. Pollinating at the very center of the works bottom edge, this bee with spread wings has been more or less prominent from one version of Bees Dick to the next since no later than 2013, an innocent counterpart to the passionately embracing cou-ples to be observed on the same Sheep Meadow lawn. Bees Dick was among the earliest realizations of what has turned out to be Janets hallmark motif: the Sheep Meadow crowded with sunbathers and picnickers on their blankets, spaced apart in something like rows that extend all the way to the far south side of the lawn. She tells me that it OPPOSITEDetail of The Tarot Card. 66 67'