Janet Kozachek

A Cultural And Artistic Travelogue:

• I would best describe myself as an eclectic artist, having harvested the best gems that I could from my education and work experiences in the U.S., China, and Europe. Fortunate to have lived and learned in so many places, I gave my curiosity free reign to explore the artistic sensibilities of different cultures and to eventually integrate them into my own unique body of work. Calligraphy and brush painting from China, ceramics from Holland, mosaics from Europe and the Americas, and oil painting from New York. My artistic exploration was both a metaphorical and literal travelogue.
• My adventures started in the early 1980's - when I was young and to a large extent, blissfully naive. About ten months after my graduation from college, I eagerly left a library job to follow my husband to the People's Republic of China. After a few years of private art and language study, I became the first American to matriculate in a formal course of study in traditional Chinese Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. It was an exotic immersion in ancient art forms and mysterious language - an experience which changed my understanding of art forever.
• Leaving good friends and five years of remarkable experiences behind, my husband and I left China and embarked on a short stint with the University of Maryland in Holland. Holland and the Dutch language were challenges for us after having lived in China for so many years. I would hear Dutch and answer in Chinese. My teaching assignments with the University of Maryland proved to be so meager that I had ample time to continue to paint, visit museums, and pursue further study in ceramic sculpture at the State Academy for Applied Arts in Maastricht.
• Every artist has in his or her life one or more epiphanies which can dramatically change a creative focus. Mine was a summer graduate course in painting at Harvard. Being back in my homeland, speaking English, painting every day and having the excellent mentorship of Professor Nan Freeman made me realize that I wanted to come back to the United States, pursue more useful work, and study with the best artists that I could find. That desire was fulfilled at Parsons School of Design where I obtained my Master of Fine Arts degree in painting in 1990, and by working as a writer, construction worker, and translator. (Yes, I sometimes did all these things during the same years by doing my freelance writing for Educational Testing Service on the train commute to New York from New Jersey, and acting as a guide and translator in China during spring and summer breaks when I wasn't doing construction work in my father's business). At Parsons, I studied with several noted painters including Larry Rivers, Paul Resika, Leland Bell, and John Heliker. Another influential person from my studies was a museum conservator, Piero Mannoni, from whom I acquired an appreciation for the use of rare and unusual painting materials and techniques - a taste almost as complex as my penchant for exotic foods, teas, both Chinese and Western opera, and unusual shrubbery.
• A summer spent in Italy in 1990 proved to be pivotal in my direction as an artist as well. The mosaics of Rome, Naples, and Ravenna inspired me to begin an exploration in this medium. During my years of research and experimentation I produced numerous mosaic pieces, including several mosaic masks incorporating traditional materials, found objects and hand-crafted tesserae. Most of my work is on the small side, with periodic larger commissions.
• All of my work, whether it is a painting or a mosaic, takes time. I spend a few weeks preparing canvas or gesso panels to paint on. I refine again and again the composition that is painted upon these panels and canvas. Layer by layer, the work evolves slowly - first as concept, then as execution. It is a prolonged dialogue between artist and media. My mosaics, too, are constructed with painstaking slowness and with intense involvement with the stuff of which they are composed. The individual tesserae used as building blocks in these mosaics are often made by hand out of fused glass and sometimes enameled with minute designs so that each one is an art work in itself. I've exhibited my work widely in the United States and abroad and continue to work as a painter, mosaicist, educator, writer, and as a former CEO of the non-profit organization for the promotion of mosaic art - the Society of American Mosaic Artists.
• My analysis through a series of paintings of a single person seated or standing alone in a room was fueled as well by my reading of Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past. (More accurately translated as "In search of the past") In this outstanding work, Proust manages to wrest the sublime out of the mundane. This is what I at least attempted to do in this series of paintings I call my "Monologues."
• Each small square canvas focuses on a person in a simple interior. The paintings are usually named for an object and not the sitter because the focus of these paintings is on the sitter's perceptions and not necessarily my perception of the sitter. In keeping with this concept, I often encouraged the model to give the painting a name and sometimes traded paintings with them as payment for modeling. It was part of my idealistic social experiment to heighten the public's sense of awareness, control, and ownership of art. The monologues were my antidote to everything I had learned or felt with regard to money and art, the self in art, and the importance of size as value. My experiment ended when I started selling well and came to the realization that I was essentially paying my models about $200.00 an hour.
• The monologue project is ongoing even though the one hundred canvases have been filled.

Selected Exhibitions:

• New York: Warde-Nasse Gallery; Macy Art Center; Stage Gallery
• New Jersey: Trenton; Princeton; Moorestown; and at Robert Wood Johnson World Headquarters in New Brunswick
• Beijing Central Art Academy Gallery, Beijing, China
• Gallerie de Vierde Dimensie, Maastrict, Holland
• Chicago: Woman-Made Gallery
• Pennsylvania: Muse Gallery; Gallery at the Vineyards, New Hope; Philadelphia; Lancaster Museum of Art in Lancaster
• North Carolina: Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville Cultural Center
• Connecticut: Erector Gallery in New Haven
• North Carolina: Touchstone Gallery in Hendersonville, Asheville
• South Carolina: I.P. Stanback Museum in Orangeburg; Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston; Portfolio Gallery in Columbia
• Florida: Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach
• Vermont: State Capital
• Texas: Mint Julep Gallery in Dallas
• Louisiana: Alexandria Museum of Art
• Tennessee: Knoxville
• Washington, DC
• Georgia: Stone Mountain Village and McIntosh Gallery in Atlanta