Janet Jappen

I have always made art. I grew up in a family that encouraged it. I still have my fairytale book that I got when I was 4 and I drew The Queen on the fly pages. A lot of my parents’ books were illustrated in the same manner. My Grandmother was a hat designer and lived in Greenwich Village and my great grandfather was a mural painter in Boston. My mother sang. My other Grandmother apprenticed in the Danish Queen’s kitchen. It’s a thread of art and music that runs in the families. It seems that stuff goes in and it goes round and round and comes out art. Art is taking things in making it yours and giving it grace It.I like to do interiors. I like to do them so they reflect the people who aren’t in them. It’s more evident in the “Water” drawings. The towel just laid down and the dish washer has just stepped away – the water bearer has put the dipper in the water crock and stepped out side to draw up the water for the laundry – I’m really looking foward to doing the laundry.  When I was four We moved to Rhinebeck permanently.   Before that we lived in the Bronx and the house on Pells road had been my Grandparents summer home. My grandfather was a business man-gentleman farmer with local folks helping him out with this farm raising pigs and he had another in the north Frisian Islands where he raised ducks.   The house had no running water and minimal electricity.  My grandparents had purchased it from the Pells family who were one of the original families in Rhinebeck and had occupied the house since the late 1700’s.  Very little had changed in that time until we moved in. For the first year we had no running water and the water for everything had to be drawn up from the well every morning. We lived five miles out of town and went into the Village once a week for shopping and an occasional movie or church. Both the house that sheltered us and the water were very important.   The other important things were the garden, the chickens and ducks - that was about food. Life was very basic and the basics made a lasting impression. Then there was play and the things that occupied my imagination and my mind then were not so different from the play I engage in now.   That is the other part of my current work.   I like to invent people and cast them in little tableaus that I create to tell a story or to convey a thought.   I’m really not interested in creating a likeness – that’s dull.  My hope is that people “get it” and that some where in their hearts they smile and remember something about themselves they haven’t thought about in a long time. When I lived in San Francisco I was part of a shop called Cathexis. Cathexis means psychic aperture and I think that art is reaching into the void through that opening and pulling something from nothing.   I find the process liberating

For more information about Janet and her work, contact the artist here.