Janet Bruce: Water in the Desert

Les Yeux du Monde is pleased to present Water in the Desert: New Paintings by Janet Bruce from March 31 – May 7, 2017.  Janet Bruce is well known for her masterful oil paintings that merge gestural and expressive line with Mark Rothko like horizontal spaces and veils of color. A studio major at Amherst college, where she had classes with Abstract Expressionist Grace Hartigan, Bruce continued her studies with master classes at the Art Institute of Boston and at the Corcoran in D.C. with William Christenberry.  She has exhibited widely and is in collections throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Emily Couric Cancer Center in Charlottesville. In 2016, she was awarded two prestigious fellowships and residencies—one at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst VA and another in Assisi, Italy at the Arte Studio Ginestrelle. The paintings she will exhibit in this show are inspired by her time in these places and also by her current work with Maurizzio Pellegrin, director of the National Academy in New York. She writes: “My paintings are a conversation about displacement and memory…[they] start with a remembered experience of a place, a landscape, or an interior. Using forms within forms, inscribed lines, and large planar shifts, I explore the light, color, and structural relationships of an imagined space.” Her chosen vertical format also amplifies the viewer’s direct physical and emotional experience with the work. She writes: “I paint to create visual statements that reverberate within.” The mysterious light filled canvases to be shown in Water in the Desert truly do “reverberate within.”

Installation shots coming soon.