Janis Clarke Living a life that's perfectly still
Olsen Annexe | 20 September – 7 October
Moonlight on water. The silhouette of a tree against the sky. A blue house. These are glimpses, snapshots, scenes internalised and condensed, that prompt us to consider the very act of looking.
At the heart of the exhibition is a cropped-in face – the only visible figure in the show. Eyes left blank or downcast, our own gaze is drawn to the patches of shade and light on the figure’s forehead –planes of colour on a rectangular space that echoes its own small canvas. ‘Apricity,’ or the sensation of the warmth of the sun on your skin in winter, is bound up in these planes of colour and the feeling, thinking world of the mind behind the surface.
Homing-in on tight compositions, through flat, still planes, devoid of superfluous detail, Janis Clarke is considering the way we see and experience the world, not through the panoramic, detailed ‘realities’ captured by realist painting or photography, but through the lived experience of looking. Painting, with its boundless possibilities can offer a way to share what has actually been seen and felt
Working predominantly at night, each tightly composed scene is an observation that has ‘etched a little place in my brain and soaked in,’ says Clarke. In each image, stillness freezes the moment as memory, refracted and replayed, deciphered and dwelled in.
As with Apricity, the titles of these paintings offer additional layers to each work. Bus stop blues captures a distinct moment of feeling uplifted after recognising the beauty of a tree outlined against the sky and forgetting the frustrations of the day. Paramnesia, or the distortion of memory, with its black mass of shadowy silhouette obscuring an orange moon, hints at uncertainty Whilst Road painting, though seemingly innocuous, points to the lines criss-crossing the Earth’s paved surfaces as hidden artworks outlining the landscape, and to painting itself as a form of labour. The descriptive title Window and pink lampshade fills in concrete details rendered at one remove through the image’s flat planes of colour
In this way, Clarke’s works hover between depiction and abstraction, leaving our minds to complete the image and inhabit the painted moment. Absorbed in these images, the perfectly still and soundless might spring back to movement as we momentarily glimpse what the artist sees.
Susannah Smith, Editor of Look magazine, Art Gallery Society, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Janis Clarke Bus stop blues, 2023 oil on linen 86 x 112 cm #34941 Framed $6,000 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Full moon and house (living a life that's perfectly still), 2023 oil on linen 96 x 112 cm #34931 Framed $6,000 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Window and pink lampshade, 2023 oil on linen 61 x 71 cm #34934 Framed $4,100 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Blue house, 2023 oil on linen 61 x 71 cm #34933 Framed $4,100 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Road painting, 2023 oil on linen 71 x 61 cm #34932 Framed $4,100 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Before the lights go out, 2023 oil on linen 61 x 71 cm #34939 Framed $4,100 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Anticipation (apricity), 2023 oil on linen 61 x 71 cm #34942 Framed $4,100 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Apricity, 2023 oil on linen 30 x 30 cm #34940 Framed $1,900 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Secret world, 2023 oil on
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#34935 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
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Janis Clarke Home, 2023 oil on linen on ply 19.5 x 26 cm #34936 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Midnight, 2023 oil on linen on ply 19.5 x 26 cm #34937 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Longing, 2023 oil on
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19.5
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#34938 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
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Janis Clarke Solitude, 2023 oil on linen on ply 19 x 24.5 cm #34930 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke A positive psychological response, 2023 oil on linen on ply 19.5 x 26 cm #34943 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Entangled, 2023 oil on linen on ply 19.5 x 26 cm #34944 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Paramnesia, 2023 oil on linen on ply 26 x 19.5 cm #34946 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
Janis Clarke Forever, 2023 oil on
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24.5 x 19
#34945 Framed $1,550 63 Jersey Road Woollahra NSW 2025 T: +61 2 9327 3922 F: +61 2 9327 3944 ABN 38 088 015 730 E: info@olsengallery.com W: www.olsengallery.com
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