Janet Alling
b.1939, New York | Providence-based painter
"Alling's flowers are decorous, contained, and make no overture to fashion. The mystery of meaning reminds me of Emily Dickinson.”
–Alex Katz
In 1964, JANET ALLING (b.1939, New York) studied among a legendary generation of artists, including Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Janet Fish, Rackstraw Downs, and Brice Marden. They turned contemporary art making into a revolution of material, scale, subject, and perception. In that vein, Alling focused her gaze on capturing and magnifying the natural world to redefine a category of painting long regarded as decorative and conventional.
After graduating from Yale, Alling moved to New York City and had her debut show in 1972 at 55 Mercer, a Co-Op space in SoHo. In his New York Times review of the exhibition, Peter Schjeldahl placed her among a group of artists who were “advancing realist painting in an important way. Almost brutal in its scale manipulations and its assertions of detail, but full of acridity and sweetness of personality, work like Alling’s reintroduces us to the visible world with a bang.”
Five decades later, Alling continues to investigate the essence and power of flora and fauna through observation and honed technique. With an unconventionally modern approach, Janet animates large scale leaves and petals, drawn from life or photographs, and compiles imagined flower gatherings. Alling credits Monet’s spirit and Malevich’s formalism, to classical music, as inspirations. She places her own type of realism in an American tradition that harkens back to Thomas Eakins: an “ambiguity of seeing–that it discloses both what’s actual and what’s possible–is pushed to extremes" in her work. Not intent on a photorealist effect, Janet imbues her subjects with their forever changing nature, making them equal parts character studies and vibrant happenings.
IN THE ARTIST'S WORDS
"There is a short story by O. Henry, The Last Leaf, about a woman dying of pneumonia. From her window, she watched a vine growing on the neighbor's wall; slowly, the leaves dropped, and she thought she would die when the last leaf fell. Her neighbor, a young woman artist, knew this. One night, before the last leaf let go, she discreetly went to the wall and painted a leaf on the vine, the last leaf.
In 1955, my mother, who had terminal breast cancer, took me to see the film based on that story. She believed in me. She knew I was an artist and, in this way, was guiding me on my life's journey.
And so, Destiny, Fate, Serendipity, Chance, Coincidence, Luck, Magic, Instinct, and Impulse enter one's life as do people. My understanding of this happened at a late age. ...Looking back, there is a pattern, a lifetime's journey through floral paintings in many settings. Now, an octogenarian, I've come full circle. I am painting watercolors of patterned leaves."
