The Works of Janet Stafford

Time as an ephemeral element is an essential part of all performing arts. But its transitory nature is not usually associated with paintings. In Janet Stafford's paintings time is a visible presence. In a luminous view of a sea horizon the edge of earth and sky sing a siren call. A skyward perspective through the leaves of a sycamore is a fundamental blue that articulates the infinite. The concrete ticking and passing of each moment, even of each lifespan, is evoked through the association of images. Each work is composed of a series of smaller paintings suspended within black (usually) grids in one large canvas, so the viewer takes in a whole chapter of images while aware of minute details: the nimbus of light over distant ranges in a desert, a smile on a girl's face, a tiny turbaned man at the foot of giant stone figures, the details of a Manhattan construction site.

The paintings are full yet spare, two-dimensional, constrained and careful in the placement of color and blended brushwork. They are large, like generous quilts hung on a wall, and serial or cumulative in character, two to twenty paintings caught within a grid that imposes, perhaps, some frail order. Does the grid signify hope, control over fate, over chaos? "In my Father's house are many mansions." The images seem to work as poetry does, where thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are perceived not in a linear way, but as if they ring so true that they are distilled directly to the mind. The paintings within each larger painting are as clearly chosen as the words of a poem.

Are you standing in front of a painting or in an unfamiliar memory? The works have an effect of transporting you into the time and place of the picture, as if the painting could not exist on its own unless you were there looking at it.

Although one is staring at static paint on a flat canvas, there is a sense of narrative, of events happening just off the edge or in the next room. A series of views in one work shows children (the artist's siblings and self) dressed in comfortably utilitarian clothing doing childhood things, a girl playing at the roots of a tree, boys pausing in their play in a purposefully ordinary room, or outdoors. The boys' figures are posed and still, like slightly uncomfortable trees, waiting for someone to snap the photo. Why do these mundane views provoke such a feeling of sadness? The people do not know who they are or what they will become. There is something courageous in their blind commitment to the moment they are in.

Ms. Stafford spends one to two years making each wall-size oil painting, apart from gathering ideas, information, and making photographs. Occasionally, she will track down specific images from other sources, as in the NASA photos used in Memory, 1986. In Construction, 1987-1988, she got permission to wander alone through a city-block-long construction site taking photographs. She spends months and sometimes years collecting the thoughts and images that become each painting. Ms. Stafford lives and works in New York City, and many of her paintings reflect the life of the city.

Her fascination with Mexico (she was born in Texas), where she visits regularly, has inspired a number of her recent landscape works. Mexico, 2001-2002, shows Jesus in a bloodied crown of thorns looking out of an empty white room. He is surrounded by views of a desert, not a romantic desert of carved rocks and dramatic sky but a slow-baking desert of endless miles of cactus and scrub, luminous and hot. A saguaro is limned by a hazy, weighted light that is felt as well as seen. There is a feeling of solitude, of unforgiving contemplation.

Time is a tangible and visible force in the works of Janet Stafford. The realism of the rendering in each painting only emphasizes the dreamy, haunting nature of the thoughts the viewer experiences while contemplating each work. The images evoke memories, stories, and questions, but Ms. Stafford is too true to define them for us. She merely reminds us to keep thinking, and that thinking is not necessarily linear, objective, or finite. The clear depiction tantalizes us, like Coyote, to come inside and be enchanted.

What are the stories? One doesn't know, but it is a pleasure to try and discern them.

--RRT