Bio

I am an artist whose paintings are inspired by the landscape. While my home and studio are in Big Bear I paint any natural forms I find stimulating. Desert plants, trees, water, rock all are subjects I respond to. My canvases are large and colorful and almost abstract. To point the viewer’s eye to things I find interesting I will amplify colors, contrast and composition. I work in acrylic paint on canvas and watercolor. For fun I also do small mixed media pieces containing images, gold and silver leaf and encaustic material as a top coating.

I grew up in the San Diego area and came to the mountains in 2002. I graduated from San Diego State University and have taken additional coursework in art throughout the years. While, for the past 25 years, I have focused on making my living with the artwork I create, I also lead workshops and hold occasional classes. I lead art camps for adults at Camp de Benneville Pines in the San Bernardino National Forest and work with various non profit organizations to lead children and adults in art projects to support the organization’s mission and help build community.

My work may be purchased through galleries and design professionals. I am a member of the Palm Springs and Los Angeles Chapters of ASID (American Society of Interior Designers) and am the 2013/2014 President of the Interior Design Society of Palm Springs.

The natural world is for artists an endless, complex seduction. Nature beacons and demands attention to its own wonders, but at the same time it appeals to the inner life of the artist. The art that results is always an affair of the heart, with attraction, enchantment and acute clarity present in varying degrees.

"In Laura Janes’ paintings we see the artist’s avid eye at work, alert and searching. She lives in the San Bernardino National Forest in southern California, and is attuned to the high desert and alpine landscape there. She has focused on desert plants, trees, and scenes of light in the forest and on water. In recent work, Janes looks closely at cactus pads, fissures in stones and the bend of a tree branch. This viewpoint is not only an index of Janes’s fascination with natural forms, but implies as well a kind of intimacy. She goes beyond a naturalist’s objectivity, and brings herself into a personal relationship with the rocks and plants she depicts.

In her painterly connection to nature, Janes takes us near to the surface of her forms, traveling as if by touch over bark and spines. Her work becomes abstract to the degree that we start to see the world in a new way. The specific identity of a form begins to shift to something unfamiliar. Rocks give way to dark, hidden portals. Agave leaves gather like a school of fish. And throughout are allusions to the human body, an association that Janes makes without any special effort. The limb of a tree appears like an arm, and rounded boulders take on the appearance of bodily forms meeting. The textures of nature remind us of skin seen close-up.

Janes’s continuity of the human and the natural goes beyond a sense of formal similarity. Her paintings are animated by the attention she gives to the nature. There is a sense of liveliness to both rocks and vegetation. Part of that energy is the artist’s own personality emerging through the observable world. Color is heightened, and pushed just beyond the natural. The unexpected is actively sought out. And the play of light on form is always paramount.

Often forms are highlighted against a well of darkness. At times, bleaching daylight creates dark crevices or shards of black shadow. Light brings out a psychedelic turquoise in a cactus or a delicate pink in a swelling stone. Janes’s vision of the world suggests that the division between us and nature is just a concept, ready to be dissolved in the light of our awareness."

John Mendelsohn is a painter who has written articles and review on contemporary art for Art Net, Cover Magazine, dart International and The Jewish Week as well as essays for exhibition catalogues. He teaches in the Studio Art Program at Fairfield University in Connecticut. He has contributed to the book, A Book of Images: Reflections on Symbols, published by Taschen in conjunction with the Archive for Research in Archetypal Sybolism at the C.G Jung Institute, New York