Janet Rothermel: Artist's Statement

Landscapes and the recurring road theme symbolize routes to a larger world where the details of my everyday life are put into their ‘proper place’. I use color and line to emphasize and exaggerate for visual impact. Time spent in search of photographs to reference for my painting — and then the act of painting those images — brings a kind of clarify to my life, and a window through which I’ve found a personally spiritual place.

I enjoy the empowerment that comes from combining blank sheets of paper, graphite lines and individual sticks of pigment, into something altogether new that cannot be reproduced in exactly the same way again. There is a ‘rightness’ about that aspect of the painting process, in that it echoes the experience of living and the changes that take place in nature, minute by minute.