b'transport and storage. Magnets came in handy for Janets process in the studio and gradually became a means by which to install collages and the multimedia components of her work, as well. The work Janet does in the park is of a precise, fact-nding nature that she describes as ongoing research. She says that she isnt out there to make a painting that will be artbut to nd truth for her canvases. Her private, utilitarian research hasnt remained so. To anyone who sees them, Janets outdoor paintings are interesting works of art in their own right. On display, they attract as much attention as her formal and nished canvases. Artists, especially, are intrigued by how theyre done. They are featured in books, exhibition catalogs, and on her website. In these pages, I discuss her materials and the outdoor studies that are most directly connected to the paintings and multimedia works of art that are the focus of this publication. Janets remarkable plein air process may stem, in part, from a refusal to ever cut corners. She explains that it wasnt possible to work in oil on such a large scale outdoors. Oil on a 15-foot-wide canvas wont dry sufciently by end of day to be safely transported without damage. Rather than break up the composition on small canvases, she solved the problem by switching to watercolor and acrylic on paper. The result was a new body of work in a range of media that was at rst unfamiliar to her. She quickly achieved a synergy of subject and process that must have something to do with her lifelong and informed engagement with materials. This may go back to her childhood, when her uncle, the American Impressionist Abel Warshawsky, brought her a set of oil paints from Paris as a gift. They came from Lefebvre-Foinet, much loved by artists for offering a multiplicity of colors, hand-ground. Many 20th-century artists would use nothing else. When Janet sought out the water-based paints she needed to work outdoors, she looked for quality. The paints she uses tend to be from traditional, even historic, rms that have high pigment content and small-batch production in common. Trained as a printmaker by Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa, Janet was fully aware of the important properties of paper as a support for a work of art. To paint in the park, she found a watercolor paper called Artistico, made at a mill in Fabriano, Italy, established in the 13th century. Artistico is sold in huge rolls that measure 11 yards, long enough to yield two 15-foot lengths when cut in half. She prefers the smooth Hot Press surface in Bright White. The 140 lb. version was sturdy yet exible enough to withstand extraordinary handling. Starting around 2010, her park studies have been composed of two 15-foot rolls of Fabriano Artistico, each measuring 55 inches, a total height of 110 inches, or about eight feet. She divides the view horizontally in two. On one roll of paper, she paints the skyline, the tree line at the horizon, the southern edge of the mead-ow, and the hanging branches overhead. The foreground of her view, on the second roll of paper, encompasses low-hanging branches, park people, and details on the lawn nearby. She paints, of necessity, on the ground, with weights holding the paper in place against the wind. In the park, Janet works at the northeast corner of the Sheep Meadow, looking south toward the buildings along 59th Street. Her paintings are composed around some xed details that she discovered early ona root that forced its way through the grass points directly at an exceptionally straight, tall tree at the horizon. The neon sign of the Essex House in the skyline lines up perfectly with that tall tree. This is the invariable, vertical, center line of her paintings. When she sets up in proximity to the people on the meadow, she sees their faces and gets all the skin. The view from this spot is framed by shrubs on the east side and cut off by a stand of trees to the west. This is the view in her rst enormous watercolorStudy #1 (see www.janetruttenberg.com)and two 8-by-15-foot canvases. Eventually called Blue Jeans/Condoms, one canvas was completed in 2019, and the second, entitled Bees Dick, is still in the works. She describes these paintings as all OPPOSITEDetail of Spring as photographed in 2022 with neon tubing shaped after the artists handwriting. 92 93'