Page 14 - the NOISE November 2012

14 • NOVEMBER 2012 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
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Kelly Janecek’s new series, “Bucket Loads of Sky,” is at West of the Moon this month.
serving in the Peace Corps. Then I met my hus- band and had some more adventures. Some- how, I found myself at 43 and decided it was a perfect time to start painting.”
“This town was a big reason why I gave it a shot,” Ms. Janecek continues. “Flagstaff is stacked to the gills with artists; full time pro- fessionals to jack-of-all-trades artists. A few of my closest friends are professional artists and gave me encouragement, tips and studio space to get me out of the gates. I’ve had no formal training or education so I sort of had to beat down the naysayer in myself, remem- bering always how fun it felt to be in a studio mixing paint, smelling paint and seeing what I could get up to. Then I’d ask those dear friends how to paint myself out of the corner I had just painted myself into, how to get color back into mud, how to avoid the dangers of white to lighten a color. After a time, I got antsy and realized I needed a goal and a deadline. I needed a show before I lost my gumption. The Flagstaff Photography Center provided the op- portunity. I had my first show, ‘Pearls and Dirt,’ in 2011 and then my second, ‘Pluck and Gump- tion,’ this last April.”
Ms. Janecek tells me about her paintings. “I haven’t really settled on a type of content and am not certain I will. I paint with oils what catches my mind or my sense of humor. I like simple compositions and objects slightly ab- stracted. I also find myself putting incongruent objects together. Living where we do, I can’t help but be inspired by our landscapes. I’ve painted a few and have been properly daunted by the task. My solution is to reduce to simple shapes. I’m a sucker for the clouds out here. I
can’t seem to stop painting those or stop hav- ing those influence my sense of space.”
“Currently I’m painting out of our home in a corner of our back room. I figured if I wait around for a perfect studio space, I’ll never paint, so I commandeered a corner of our room and paint in chaos. But when my kids are at school it is quiet chaos and all mine,” she shares. “I have heaps of files of ideas; magazine or photo clippings of everything from a color I like that I saw in a kitchen ad to pictures I’ve taken of fruit, junipers and faces. I tend to do one of two things: I either stick on an audio book — always a British murder mystery — or music that would get my girlfriends and me up on a dance floor.”
I ask Ms. Janecek what we should expect to find at her show this month, “My show at West of the Moon is titled, ‘Bucket Loads of Sky.’ I’ll have a few landscapes which are a logical con- nection to the title but the inspiration for the name comes more for all that happens under that sky and that we just have bucket loads of sky here!”
West of the Moon is located at 14 N. San Francisco and will be holding an opening for “Bucket Loads of Sky,” during the First Friday
ArtWalk on November 2 from 6PM to 9PM. Kel- lyJanecek.com, WestoftheMoonGallery.com
HISTORIC HOVENWEEP
Hovenweep National Monument on the Utah and Colorado Border is one of the stun- ning sights of the Southwest that give us a glimpse into the past to the time of the An- cient Pueblo people. This November at Will McNabb Fine Jewelry Studio photographs