“ Imagined Landscapes: Paintings from Montecastello di Vibio, Italy”
Janice Martin resides in Belleville, Michigan and has earned both the BFA and MA in drawing from Eastern Michigan University. She also attended graduate school at New York University, in Venice, Italy, and Student Art Center International in Florence, Italy. Most recently, she completed an artist residency program at the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy where she worked with renowned international artists and art professors from schools such as Yale, Maryland Institute of College of Art, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Martin has exhibited her paintings both locally and internationally. She is also an art educator and has taught art in the Saline Area Schools for the past 15 years.

Artist statement:
Currently, I am exploring the idea of landscapes both imagined and real.  I invent colors, movement and rhythm that only exist from within to reveal my feelings about the landscape.  Sometimes I paint from direct observation, but in the end, I rely on memories, thoughts and feelings that intermingle based on past experiences. The physicality of the paint on the surface of the canvas- thick against thin, is an important concept in exploring the idea of space. Unconscious thoughts are revealed into something that is tangible.  While I am painting these real and imagined places, I am renewed, and transformed. In this way, the very act of painting is a metaphor of healing and growth.  It is through the taking apart and breaking down the elements, scraping and rebuilding the surface with paint, and reconstructing the compositions this transformation and healing process occurs. Painting for me becomes a form of dreaming and is a way to escape, to be transported and lifted into another realm.