b'painting, entitled Little Girl Watching Bird, is composed of two lengths of canvas that could beprinter in her studio, this method has been a constant tool in her Central Park process. In 2019, she managed safely in this manner. Some nal touches were made in the studio. extended the practice on a huge scale and took full-size inkjets of Study #52 and her oil painting, E=mc 2, to the park for the rst time. Now covered with painted corrections and additions, they are In the studies that Janet made with Bees Dick in mind in 2017, she is distancing herself fromStudies #53, #54, #55, and #56. Working on multiple inkjets in the park enabled her to resolve the portraiture and the genre subjects she observes on the meadow. In Study#47, the gures arecomposition for E with four options. The inkjets document something about process that a sparseher focus is on the extremes of light and shade, depicted as contrasting abstract shapesmethodical artist can otherwise know only vaguely and no one else ever sees. The inkjets record in the foreground. One imagines a still, hot day. The accidents of paint drops and stray marks arethe moment when various options or directions are possible. They preserve, to the extent possi-the results of Janets own kind of action painting. The end goal of her lively brushwork isntble, a state of the painting that cant exist. abstraction but the shape-shifting shadows cast by the moving branches. That same summer, Janet was working on a brilliantly executed watercolor, Study #49, when a fellow came along andDuring the pandemic in 2020, Janet missed the spring season. Masked and protected, she resumed sat down, joining a couple in the middle distance of her view. He seemed to be showing them cardpainting from a far corner of the Sheep Meadow in July, when many New Yorkers began to gath-tricks. Fascinated by their interaction, she started recording the episode on video while paintinger freely (or safely distanced) in city parks. Her watercolor studies now number over 80 and, the gures into the composition. She went on to create an inkjet of Study #49 to explore theirat times, she has expressed that she has done enough work outdoors to nish the four oversized exchange more fully. A full-color, full-scale, matte, inkjet print of Study #49 was used for thecanvases in the studio. She has resolved that she will wrap up the Central Park subject and move multimedia work for at least two good reasons: Janets concern about the light sensitivity of theon. Over many weeks in 2020 she focused on merging the portrait and panorama aspects of the watercolors, and because the irregular gloss of the paint interferes with projected video. As forSheep Meadow into one composition. In 2021, she pressed hard to nish Spring. Yet, even as she the initial painted study, the gures in Study #49 are pictured in a setting that is extremely lushsays she will move on, she began a new canvas, albeit smaller in scale. The large Central Park paint-and verdant. Although she doesnt consider herself a watercolorist, Study #49 is painted in theings culminate with the nine-foot canvas called E=mc 2. This is the canvas that had been against a loose, gestural manner that is its most admired quality. Here, Janet achieves it on an enormouswall for years. Its the point of all of the years of study. She began it with the goal of painting hundreds scale. The freedom of her watercolor technique in 2017 doesnt factor into the oil painting, nowof people picnicking, but her ambition for this full panorama of the meadow now seems far greater embellished with video screens, surrounded by its own video frame and nearing completion.andafter so many years of discipline, focus, and studyfully achievable. Janet was rst drawn to the Sheep Meadow by the great diversity of the crowds, yet her earliestSARAH BERTALAN has had a long career in the curatorial and conservation departments of people sketches kept growing in size as she added more and more of the setting around them. Atmajor institutions on the East Coast and as a conservator and consultant in New York City. Sar-rst, she felt unprepared to paint landscape, yet she considers it the ultimate subject of her workahs research on works on paper, her area of specialization, has been wide-ranging. Recently, her outdoors. The reason there are so many studies, she says, is that after she has pursued each paint- publications have focused on late 19th and early 20th century artistprintmakers. ing fully in a direction, she then has to start again in order to follow another pictorial direction or motif. Its also true that painting her large watercolors isnt the only work she pursues there. She has been studying each detail at Sheep Meadow with discipline and focus. Her exhaustive re-search is everywhere in evidence in her studio. Many hundreds of pencil and watercolor sketches of park subjectsgures, buildings, hanging branches, the rootare organized in portfolios. Thou-sands of annotated reference and process inkjet prints are led by painting and boxed. There are thousands of videos and many tens of thousands of digital les in her library of photographs. Outdoors, she studies the physical space of Sheep Meadow and faithfully represents every detail. She is painting the illusion of the Sheep Meadow. Indoors, she works in a manner that she describes as cubist, in that her paintings afrm the two-dimensional picture plane. The whole point of her journey, she says, has been one canvas, begun around 2008 and set aside for years. Now called E=mc 2its a view of the meadow from gate to gate that she nally returned to in 2017. That year, she painted watercolor Study #51 which she connects directly with this challenging canvas. In it, she appears to be reconciling her outdoor research with her indoor picture-making. She explains that painting the gates east to west show the atness of the picture plane. She visualizes a at plane along the eastwest axis. In Study #51, The south gate, and I as a viewer at the north gate, pierce that picture plane, making a circle in depth, lying in the middle of the atness of the picture plane. The circle may be the interface of two types of perception, two ways of image making. While she had produced a great number of studies in 2017, by contrast, Janet worked on only a single watercolor in the park over the entire summer of 2018, the extraordinary Study #52. Janet has always used photography to record portrait paintings in stages. She uses the images to study and mark up, to prepare for the next sitting. With digital photography and a high-quality 9899'