b'the paintings surface like a transparent wash, no more substantial than the diluted paint with which she indicates buildings in the background. As free color, this neon light adds a harmonious overtone to the capricious textures of interwoven shades of painted green grass and trees.The superimposition of light over paint, nally, is just another layer for consideration. With her upcoming exhibition in mind, Janet also incorporated green neon tubing into Blue Jeans/ Condoms. At one stage this large, still gureless painting had been entitled simply Condoms, because such safe-sex debris is included in the extraordinary close-up still-life of grasses, wildowers, and weeds that Janet painted all across its bottom. From the start, she organized this composition as a stark contrast between the rich if disorderly miniature world observed in detail along the bottom as foreground, and the generalized rendition of the faint geometric silhouette of the faraway skyline of giant buildings in the background along the top. Quite different from the skyscraper-rich skyline visible today south of the Sheep Meadow, the skyline visible in Blue Jeans/Condoms was added to this large composition, begun back in 2005, when Janet covered the gigantic blank surface with green as an impromptu experiment, letting it drip down to establish a fragile, glowing surface. Janet transferred the skyline as a tracing from a panoramic watercolor that she had made of the view across the park from the southern end of the Metro-politan Museum of Arts roof. Atypical insofar as it still lacked gures, the paintings composition evolved especially slowly. By 2018 the graphic protagonists in Condoms, arranged across the composition like a frieze, were long, bending blades of grass, their silvery edges reecting the pale light, or ltering it in the case of the single upright translucent blade that bisects the compositions bottom half. The only gures at the time were a few faint white shapes far across the lawn at left, scarcely visible in the blurring mist, with pale pink dabs no bigger than ngertips for heads. It was not until early 2019 that Janet added a life-sized reclining couple, both in jeans, across the center of the composition, just beyond the bending blades of grass, everything observed from ground level. Janet based her painted image on a photograph of an Asian couple that she had incorporated into several previous works, including a video with a hand-painted animation of what Janet calls dancing grass superimposed over them. For her painting she transformed the Asian gures into a mixed-race couple: a blond male, his face aglow, as he reaches his heavily tattooed left arm under his partners blouse, revealing her light-brown skin, accented by sunlight along the hip, as well as the elaborate tattoo covering her back. As if to re-emphasize the blades of grass after the intrusion of the large gures, Janet decided to make a vertical slash at the middle of her canvas through a section of the single upright blade. Behind this slit she mounted an apple green neon tube to convey the slightly pulsed sight of sunlight ltering through the blades delicate membrane. Symbolizedla Freud by the aligned slit and blade, the couples evident sexual contentment resonates in the bulbs green glow. All but alone on the broad Sheep Meadow in the morning mist, oblivious to their lack of privacy, the couple is something that might be overlooked but that captures our full attention. Dispensing with the LCD screens she used in all her earlier electronic frames, Janet used the underlying circuit boards as the modular units for the mostly unilluminated frame that she designed for Blue Jeans/Condoms. In the abstract visual terms of color and shape, the exposed miniature circuitry is in step with the geometry of the silhouetted architecture in the paintings background. Only four of the 160 circuit boards that make up the frame are equipped with screens. Two vertically oriented screens show the video of her favorite Central Park accordionist dressed as a unicorn, while, like a premonition in miniature of the large painting, two horizontally oriented OPPOSITEDetail of Blue Jeans / Condoms. 80 81'